Yes there is - a widely used character set (when Unicode talks about "writing systems" it explicitly includes all the computer character sets used in practice pre-unicode) used by japanese 'featurephones' had emoji characters, so in order to be able to include that character set in unicode, unicode had to add emoji.

They're sort of neither. The peach emoji will render differently on iOS, Android, Windows. And I'm sure emoji-replacement packs are possible on Windows and Android (even though it's also guaranteed to be a virus).

So a peach emoji is not the same thing as the iOS peach-emoji-image. Similar to how changing my font doesn't change the actual characters.

I don't think including emojis was a great idea, but now that it's happened and people everywhere use them, emoji have become characters. I agree with your point, but it's already happened and so now there's not really any going back.

Yes there is. We're using it right now. Even linguists are studying the use of emoji today.

But that doesn't change the fact that most people use them snd like them, and there is not much technical disruption. They just chose practicality over purity.

Not only that - people use them in textual communication the way letters traditionally are used. There is probably a lot better argument for emoiji than a lot of other things in unicode (but it is a slippery slope)

Most people (me included) like funny cat videos and send funny cat videos. Shall we include some to Unicode?

I mean, this ship has long sailed, but that was a mistake nevertheless. Not everything has to be a unicode character.

If there were specific funny cat videos that were culturally relevent, maybe.

For example I could see there being an emoji for keyboard cat.

That wouldn't be practical. It would make fonts too big, and videos aren't a thing that goes inline in text.

However, I could totally see some kind of open source GIF library of a few hundred meme videos and pictures, to standardize the "Reply with a GIF" thing in some P2P chat ecosystem, and maybe it could have a new URL scheme for referring to OpenMemes images.

You can have entire sentences constructed out of emoji.