>It's interesting to note that VB in the unmanaged code arena actually emits C which is then compiled and bound into an executable; I don't know based on my own experience, but I'd not be surprised to find that VB.Net is not a great deal more than a wrapper on C#'s CLR emitter.

Based on how the CLR is supposed to work, it doesn't surprise me that all of the languages end up using some common emitter. The object code has to be the same or else it isn't compliant with the CLR.