In many ways, probably with the exception of the saxophone, the guitar represents the final frontier in creating playable, convincing and realistic virtual instruments. In the past, virtual guitar instruments and plugins still lacked the realism that would make it difficult to tell if it was played by a real guitarist or sequenced by a keyboard player on a DAW. Currently, it seems that this is no longer the case. 

The new crop of electric and acoustic guitar virtual instruments that utilize either an ultra deep sample based engine, or physical modelling technology, can create authentically natural chords, strums, and other guitar parts that are harder to distinguish from a studio recording of a real guitarist. Moreover, these plugins have the logic and thinkng of guitarist built in, with regard to choice of fret, position, inversions, articulations techniques and more. 

Many virtual guitar instrument plugins also include microphone, preamp, amp, speaker and effect modeling, all of which only add to the versatility, realism and completeness of these software guitar instruments.