All this cryptic error messages really says is…use the 64 bit version of Windows, not the 32 bit as the cordova docs suggest.

As a tip to prevent much pain, suffering and tears, the Windows Phone emulator will NOT run in in a nested virtualisation environment, at least not when I tried it on Virtualbox. e.g. it won’t run on a mac running Virtualbox containing Windows.

Bootcamp or something similar is probably your best bet for running it on a mac. Or a windows phone device, though Parallels users might have better luck.