I'd say an everdrive is emulation if only for the fact the storage medium for the rom is completely different to a Hucard. There is of course more than this but that is sufficient.
Most important thing : Play, enjoy.
It'd be neat to do a survey on all relevant forums regarding this. I think most would see emulation related to software console emulation, but collector-heavy communities would have an amount of people seeing flashcarts as emulation.
I think I'm going to go enjoy some non-emulated games on my flashcart now 
FWIW I agree it should be considered emulation. Emulation that is the closest to the real thing without it being a developer/publisher release. One thing that makes flash carts feel like emulation is how easily a rom can modified or dumped wrong, and unless you dump it yourself and know exactly what you're doing, you never know what is going on in a rom, could be a renamed Keith Courage.rom
. When I was in my emulation/ROM using years I would often find multiple rips of the same game that would have variances (bad dumps, trainers, hacks.) Sure you can find revisions of the same game (Revenge of Shinobi, anyone?) but those changes were made by the developer and officially released, and are generally either historically epic in notability, or hardly noticeable. I feel like a fan modified version, home brew, and the like, are all adding to the "feeling" of emulation you're referring to card readers as not having. Sure it's the original hardware, but it's potentially a modified Rom, or improperly dumped ROM, etc. All of this on top of the fact there is actual emulation being performed at the hardware level (as discussed,) I side wholly on the idea that using a flash card is a form of emulation, or emulating. Although it is the the best way to play the games aside from retail releases, it's still emulation. I feel like it's a similar argument to the Retron 5. Some actually defend it as not emulation, because you're playing the actual carts. It's the inverse to this argument that has the same answer, emulation at any level is emulation, and there's nothing wrong with any of it. Enjoy the game, and if you want more authenticity there are a great number of options and levels of that authenticity available.
That being said, I am curious how to get a hold of one. I am not way into emulation, but there are quite a few games, such as Coryoon, that I will never be able to justify purchasing even if I can afford, so this is probably the road I need to invest in eventually, if I want to check out the rarez
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