My main use of QEMU is to run (in isolation, preferably) old software, whether it's some ancient game or some ancient accounting software or what have you. Said software is usually distributed as floppies (or, nowadays in a world where virtualization is hot shit) floppy images. Thus, even in virtualized environments, there's still a use case, for me at least. I can use DOSBox for a lot of this, I'm sure, but not all the things I run on QEMU run on DOS (and some of the things which do run on DOS don't run on MS-DOS or FreeDOS).

In the physical world, I still maintain quite a few old computers (and I mean really old) that do things around the house or someone else's house. Many of these lack working CD-ROM drives and USB ports (let alone bootable USB ports), so the most surefire means to transfer data to/from them are either over a network (which depends on them having a NIC; this isn't always the case) or via floppies (which pretty much all of them have); floppy drives are also almost universally needed on these machines in order to boot OS installers (and, in some cases, even boot the main OS itself; I have at least one machine that boots off a floppy with GRUB in order to load an OS of choice off a USB thumbstick - one of the lucky few I have that has USB ports without supporting USB boot). Here, Linux having a floppy controller is incredibly useful (whether in virtualized or physical environments), since it makes it easier to create boot floppies and the like with `dd`.