I'm going to lay out a specific scenario in which WBE arrives very soon, so that other things are not much changed. I'm assuming here that the scanning route starts with legal death and vitrification. I'm also assuming no hardware overhang - that initially, vast amounts of compute hardware are required, and WBEs are no faster than we are or perhaps slower. This and other assumptions I haven't noticed well enough to state add up to a large conjunction and so a correspondingly small spot in probability space, treat with appropriate caution.

The literal first people would be test subjects; people dying of something that doesn't affect the brain, who aren't signed up for cryonics but who are sympathetic enough to take a shot at immortality. I'm not sure what sort of fate to expect for these first volunteers, given that there are things we would like to know that it will be hard to learn from animal testing and it's difficult to get those things right first time.

Once the procedure has been demonstrated to work well in humans and preserve memory and personality, then the interesting questions start. Lots of people who aren't signed up for cryonics would sign up, even though WBE is far outside their budget, because they have good reason to hope that it will one day be affordable. In its initial stages, WBE will primarily be seen as a way of escaping terminal illness for the very rich. In places where euthanasia is legal, some who would otherwise have waited longer will opt for euthanasia followed by WBE. There may be cryonics patients today whose fortunes would cover WBE, they might also be brought back.

It's currently illegal to assist suicide in a healthy person even if you plan to cryopreserve them, and I don't expect that to change right away. The first healthy and rich person to arrange their own "suicide" in order to be uploaded will presumably generate lots of publicity and controversy.

In this scenario, three things then start to happen which make it much harder to see where things go next!

• The study of the brain leaps ahead given data from WBE. "WBE drugs" are the equivalent of mind-affecting drugs which, since they operate on an emulated brain, can achieve levels of specificity of function that real drugs can never hope to achieve, and which are far easier to develop and test given the ability to take backups.
• WBE starts to get faster than human thinking - even if the hardware isn't getting faster, our better understanding will enable shortcuts.
• WBE starts to get cheap enough for cloning to be considered. At this point a for-profit venture would be interested in offering loans to very high-income professionals like top lawyers or computer programmers to pay for their scanning and initial emulation, and we start to move towards a Hansonesque world of productive copy clans.