Funny, I instead had that reaction to nano being there after I read "good at their job." I mean, that's one way of looking at nano, I suppose, depending on how you define "job"...
Partly because listing emacs or vim would launch a flame war, but Nano's intent is to be a small text editor, friendly enough for newbies, to handle small jobs, like writing an email, or editing /etc/fstab. And it does that pretty well.
But you listed emacs?
I forgot I did that. It was because Emacs is really technically impressive. It's a bit ugly in places, but on the whole, it's remarkably well designed.
Yeah, nano is good for people like me used to GUI editors but it isn't amazingly good.
I figured the poster was just avoiding naming either text editor that gives around half of the HN population kneejerk responses.
Brief versus WordStar yet again? (-:
This would cast nano in the rôle of Tedit, of course.