Currently as you know that there are projects with OpenWRT on ARM.
Besides that from buildroot you can choose a wide range of ARM MPU, to build a new distribution, there are also some commercial SoC projects like this.
Well! Do you can virtualize these images with similar features and good performance?
Sure! The performance is decided by the host machine and also the available network hardware.
For the software there are several network-bridge strategy allowing Qemu virtualization have almost every feature you can find inside a dedicated hardware.
Here another link about a good implementation of these network-bridges on Qemu.