The mini-map is the first thing I disable. Fun idea but distracting in practice IMHO.
That's what I thought too, but didn't disable it. Now I've found that it's great when you're searching within a file, because you can see the search matches highlight on the minimap. The same highlighting is also great when linting files (https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeLint) to see where errors are.
Some discussion about a mini-map plugin for Vim came up when Sublime 1 came out. From what I can remember, it was either impossible or very hard to do in Vim, but there was an Emacs implementation done.
in the current form its impossible in vim. perhaps vico can implement something but im not looking to jump on that ship.