The original Pinball Arcade I love to utter bits. It is solidly to blame for my presence here, as it was a clear reminder that there was so much more to the pinball games than I remembered (and that the Pro Pinball series was a much more realistic and authentic attempt at creating plausible games than I realised.) I own all tables on the bloody thing! Haven't quite managed to go for all the Stern ones yet as they are more costly...
They are awesome for figuring out timings of lights and shots, finding scoring paths and just generally learning the ruleset of a table, and while not 100% accurate - and never will be - they get many key realities of the original tables very spot on - as in, you're obviously not going to be able to transplant exact shot angles and learn each game just by muscle memory hop off then roll over the score on a real machine, but it will teach you intuitively what shots are risky and how difficult is shot is to make. Despite my heavy play on Pinball Arcade and much shorter playtime on real machines (so far!) I don't think it's taught any bad habits that hurt real play - if anything, I do infinitely better on my first games on real machines I've played before on Pinball Arcade compared to games I've never played myself.
The only game that I do grossly better on Pinball Arcade compared to the real thing, was Twilight Zone, where on TPA I could normally hit LITZ on demand, and in person I have yet to achieve it or even break 250mil ever... but saying that, they recently re-tuned TZ, and now I'm just as **** on it on TPA as I am in real life, so I can't even use that as an example anymore!
Short version - yes, these games are absolutely fine and worth your time... they're not as good as the real thing, but they were good enough to get my interest in the real thing furiously ignited.