I used vim and vi for about 25 years before switching to Emacs. I had many thousands of lines of configuration in my .vimrc that I needed to port over, because I didn't want to lose any functionality over vim.
It took a really long time and a lot of effort to get Emacs to do everything that I could do with vim, but I finally did it, and now Emacs does not only pretty much everything vim ever did for me, but does a lot more.
I don't regret the switch or the time and effort it took in the slightest. However, there are a couple of things I do miss about vim and occasionally even fire up vim for.
One is the inferiority of Emacs' regex engine, in certain important respects, like \zs and \ze in vim, which have no Emacs regex equivalent. Those patterns let one match on the beginning or ending of a regex pattern while leaving the position of the cursor/point somewhere else and highlighting a subset of the entire match. That can be pretty useful in certain situations, but it's not enough to leave Emacs and go back to vim.
Another aspect where I find vim superior is in handling large files and files with very long lines. It's just way more performant than Emacs in those situations. Emacs does have long-lines-mode, but it's a hack, and doesn't work in dynamic buffers (like shell buffers) anyway. For handling such files I sometimes temporarily switch back to vim, and back to Emacs after I'm done with that file.
Other than that, there's really nothing about vim that I miss. Though, since I've left vim I have heard that neovim has achieved integration in to various IDEs and other apps that I wish Emacs had.
Anyway, back to the original question about tips for someone else making the transition from vim to Emacs: Apart from perseverance and the use of evil, I'd suggest making hydras for every major mode that you use. That's made Emacs way more useful for me.
Oh, and learn eLisp! If I hadn't known and loved Lisp, I would not have switched from vim to Emacs. There's just no way I could have ever configured Emacs to have all that vim-like functionality (and more besides) if I hadn't known eLisp and actually enjoyed using it.
That Emacs itself and the entire Emacs ecosystem was written in a Lisp was actually a major draw for me to make the switch from vim to Emacs, and in fact it is what's made writing that mountain of configuration not only bearable but actually fun and interesting.
If you hate Lisp, stay far away from Emacs. If you like Lisp, run to Emacs! :) If you don't care one way or the other, give Lisp and Emacs a try.. you might learn to love them, like I do.