Wow really great feedback so far.
I have tried it and it works great. I am exploring ways to have wemo emulator run automatically after a reboot but an encountering permission issues where things in /etc/init.d/ cant run python scripts that control pinouts.
The receptacle I used did have a tab on the hot side that I removed.
It gets power from a wall wart (the gap on the top left is for the micro USB cable), and I would much preferred a compact power supply along the lines of what folks are suggesting, but didn’t have any luck finding anything compact - I will explore the referenced Recom products.
In terms of advantages over a real wemo, I’m still figuring that out 
- You could control a lot more outlets for your money if you got an 8 relay module and made a smart light strip but probably breaking even at best to control two.
- I don’t have a wemo, but obviously you have a much more powerful device with more potential if you built it with a pi, but one that is probably not going to work as smoothly as a wemo. I would imagine you could make more sophisticated scripts in python to control the outlets and perhaps wire in other sensors like IR sensors, ambient light detection, etc.
- With the emulator you can create an arbitrary number of fake wemo devices, so you could potentially leverage that to automate things beyond just your outlets with your Echo. So in my case I have a streaming webcam running on another pi, and I could conceivably tell the Echo to “turn webcam off” which would ultimately run a python script to shut down the service.