Do you think it is better to buy games on their original consoles, or save the money, and just buy them on modern-day, downloadable services (Virtual Console, Xbox Live Arcade, PSN)?

At PAX, I was given a blast from the past by seeing a lot of old NES, SNES, Genesis, and even Atari games for sale at various vendors, many of which are so obscure that I forgot they existed, or that I had only read about in magazines like Nintendo Power.  There are a lot of fun games that simply put will likely never be available on digital download services, and if I had the choice, I'd own them in their physical form.

I had an Atari, NES, Sega Genesis, SNES, blah blah blah. Now, if I didn't have any children or these items where still easily available, I would go out and try to find the original physical copies but I now would rather go with the newer digital format. I trust my children wouldn't ruin it but it isn't worth the risk.  
 
Now... I understand things like these are collectibles so I would rather save the money. Last thing I bought that I felt was waaaay too much was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PS2 when you just couldn't find anymore copies for it. I spent $40 for it which sucked but hey, its the original copy, not a greatest hit or anything like that. 

I don't know if it was mentioned before, but retro games in Xbox Live, PSN or Wii Shop are bound by size limitations imposed by the online services. That causes games to have smaller or no openings, and the chopping of some of the superfluous (or not) content. 
 
So i prefer the originals.