I refused to use Visual Studio for code editing until ViEmu came along. These days I use VsVim. vi is fantastic for editing/writing and using the other niceties of Visual Studio is a win-win, as you said.
The VIM way is a very good way of editing text. IDEs offer a lot more than editing text. Faking an IDE within a text editor with random plugins is terrible. Emulating VIM text editing within a real IDE is amazing. Just use VIM keybindings in your industry standard IDE, you will be able to use all the tips in the linked article and still not miss out on anything offered by the IDE.
The only problem is that the VIM keybindings are integrated into direct text editing, but not the IDE UI. For example, in Visual Studio, IntelliSense offers you a choice of possible completions for a variable name you are typing. You can only navigate these choices with your cursor keys, rather than with the VIM-style jkl; keys. But it's a small price to pay for really good text-editing qualities!
I have ctrl-j and ctrl-k mapped to down and up on my keyboard for just this reason. If you have a keyboard that supports macros it's easy to do and it works for all those annoying places in Visual Studio and the rest of the OS you need to use arrow keys for.