I copied my SD card contents straight to the eMMC chip and it worked fine.
suppose SD card is /dev/sda and eMMC chip is /dev/sdd
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd bs=1k
Caveats:
* My eMMC chip was a different (smaller capacity) size.
So after copy I used
1) fdisk -> delete and recreate the ext4 partition so it matches the eMMC size.
2) resize2fs to shrink the ext4 file system to match the new partition.
After eMMC chip is populated with new file system, I just had to change the boot pins on the dev board to boot from eMMC.