Building a mind from scratch sounds much easier.

I disagree -- I would argue that, in principle, simulating/emulating a mind would be much easier than building a mind from scratch. My main justification is that simulating a brain is much more straightforward than building one from scratch. They are both undoubtedly extremely difficult tasks, but we are much closer to being able to accomplish the simulation. As a rough measure of this, you can try to look at where current companies and researchers are placing their bets on the problem. For example, brain simulation is a field which is already maturing rapidly (IBM's project being a keynote example), whereas the state of the art of "mind design from scratch", as it were, is still essentially speculative. Some groups like Goertzel's team and others are looking at it, but no big company is taking on the task.