Yeah, but it would be as much hardware as the Virus is, really. It would just allow you to edit the routing (instead of having a fixed one, even though it's rather flexible) to do, say, put the distortion before the filter section, or anything you can imagine. It's a way of combining the modules, and the limit for this is the amount of DSP available. The playing and editing of the sound, once this presets (they're really synths) are done, would be on the keyboard and with knob tweaking, and the sound comes from audio, just like the Virus.
But I really don't worry much about the difference between hardware and software when it comes to digital synths. In a way, the Virus is a plug-in with a dedicated hardware. And these days, along with the return of real analogue on the market, we're also seeing software catching up in its ability to reproduce the real sound of analogue gear: things like U-He's Diva can blow your mind! If you close your eyes, you won't tell the difference, let alone in a mix... And I think FM8 is probably the best digital FM synth out there, for example. And things like Zebra, allowing you to draw waves by hand and having such mad routing possibilities (and don't get me started on Reaktor, search for Tim Exile Reaktor's setup on youtube and let your jaw drop eheh) is something that even hardcore hardware people should keep an eye on. At the end of the day what matters is the music we make, and nowadays there's plenty of ways to sound good.
I got into this totally inside the box, and only recently got myself a couple of hardware synths, for example. Once you learn to make them sound good, even the cheap plug-ins we used to have, imagine what you can do with the real deal. I think the difference between my generation and yours, so to speak, is that we're getting to know hardware after using computers a lot, and you're doing the opposite. And it's cool. Full circle, again
