Not useful to serious programmers? Do you feel the same way about Vim? Just because you haven't gotten used to using something, doesn't mean it's necessarily total shit. There is a reason why people have been using emacs for decades.
You don't really want to implement all of that in VIM because your work won't be portable.
Have you seen a really seasoned vim user work? Purely from an efficiency point of view, vim/modal text editing is simply better than traditional text editors.