I applaud getting rid of the duplication, but isn't it a little dangerous here to set up a fake TimingSimpleCPU class and to ignore the se.py options? Maybe you should have a warning if the options don't match what you're forcing? That would avoid any potential confusion.

Alternatively it might make sense to factor out the common parts of this script into a bunch of stuff that other people can use in an se.py like script of their own. That would be nice in the long term, but getting rid of all that code is still great right now.