Yes, that seems like a reasonable way to state more rigorously the distinction between systems I might care about and systems I categorically don't care about.
Though, thinking about Permutation City a bit more... we, as readers of the novel, have access to the frame in which Peer's consciousness manifests. The residents of PC don't have access to it; Peer is no easier for them to access than the infinite number of other consciousnesses they could in principle "detect" within their architecture.
So we care about Peer, and they don't, and neither of us cares about the infinite number of Peer's peers. Makes sense.
But there is a difference: their history includes the programming exploit that created the space in which Peer exists, and the events that led to Peer existing within it. One can imagine a resident of PC finding those design notes and building a gadget based on them to encounter Peer, and this would not require implausible amounts of either energy or luck.
And I guess the existence of those design notes would make me care more about Peer than about his peers, were I a resident of PC... which is exactly what I'd predict from this theory.
OK, then.
Permutation City is an awesome novel that was written in 1994. Even if the author, Greg Egan, used a caricature of this community as a bad guy in a more recent novel, his work is still a major influence on a lot of people around these parts who have read it. It dissolves so many questions around uploading and simulation that it's hard for someone who has read the book to talk about simulationist metaphysics without wanting to reference the novel... but doing that runs into constraints imposed by spoiler etiquette.
So go read Permutation City if you haven't read it already because it's philosophically important and a reasonably fun read.
In the meantime, if you haven't then you should also read A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (of "singularity" coining fame) and then read Eliezer's fan fic The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover which references both of them in interesting ways to make substantive philosophical points and doesn't take too long to read.
In the comments below there will be discussion that has spoilers for all three works.