Nah, not really
well, not entirely

ROM stands for Read only medium
can mean anything that's write once, read many times
(in fact, WORM is an alternative acronym - Write Once, Read Many)

CD-ROMs
Game cartridges
(normally) Read only memory (Ie. a BIOS chip) - although these can be flashed

they're all ROMs

Roms in the game emulation sense just means a game cartridge (or CD, or whatever) has been copied bit-for-bit into a file
the emulator then reads the file

but anyway
it's more the legality side that's annoyed me
people labelling something "illegal" just cause they don't like it, or understand what it is