If the issue at hand is the denial of physicality, then the issue of emergence is significant, because arguments that claim qualia cannot be physically localized can quickly be dismissed as naive. Much more significantly, if you are actually attempting to understand consciousness, then you are ill-equipped to do that if you are unaware of the nature of emergence.

If you insist that there is no difference, then it goes both ways. I think you are actually right in a way you did not intend: more sophisticated versions of the qualia argument are ultimately no better, as at some point, it always comes down to what you are prepared to believe - that there is a fundamental difference that cannot be bridged.

There was a time when humanity found it impossible to believe that life could arise from matter alone, yet dualism in this regard has effectively been abandoned, at least scientifically and philosophically. While this does not, of course, prove anything about the mind, it does show how arguments from the fundamental difference between matter and information-like things are really appeals to plausibility. As an observation that there is a gap in our understanding, that is fine; as a claim that the difference can never be resolved, they are just opinions.

And as I briefly speculated in my last paragraph, the physical basis for color as a quale might be surprisingly localized...