I don't get why people say vim is hard to learn. It's really not that hard. It's just the multi-modality that people don't expect. Once you understand there's 2 modes that you switch between, you can get a handle on most of the basic commands in like 5 minutes.
The thing that makes emacs and vim superior to most other editors for me is that they can parse compiler output and lets you navigate through the errors and warnings easily. You usually don't get that without having a full-blown IDE.
Oh yeah, also, you get to keep your fingers on the home row. Who the fuck wants to move their hand back and forth between home row, arrow/home/insert/delete/pgup/pgdown keys, and the mouse anyway? How annoying is that?