>What do the graphical environments gain you

Simplicity. In my IDE, I start it up and then program.

With emacs, it always felt like I spent a lot of time curating the editor. Part of that was because customizing emacs is fun--I have this big .emacs file that imports an even bigger .elisp file--but I also always seemed to be referring to some documentation because I'd forgotten that particular set of key-chords or messing with something to get it to work.

I've come to prefer simplicity. In fact, after years of using emacs, I switched to vim for the moments when I want to program on the command line. (I think my only customization in VIM is mapping jj to escape)