Sure, or you could use "emacs -Q," but all of those performance improvements are off by default, and it seems like they always will be. As long as that's true Vim will always be the quicker and easier way to modify a file.
I used to use "jed" as a close to Emacs, light text editor to use for a quick edit from the shell. Nowadays I aliased jed to "emacs -nw -Q" (-nw: text mode, -Q: skip all configs), which subjectively starts instantaneously. And even a bare Emacs skipping the system an my configurations is very powerful. It also supports millions of colors with Konsole, so it's nice when reading code.
edit: am emacs (and nvi) user. just chiming in on .1ms vs 1ms startup time arguments as a basis for anything important