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Emacs gets a new release frequently. 24.0 is about to come out (it's in pretest), and 23.4 was just released.

Also, since it's a Lisp machine, it doesn't necessarily need to have IDE features added - you can just write your own extension in Emacs Lisp.

Emacs is a Lisp interpreter. You can extend it by writing in Lisp.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elisp

Neither Emacs nor Vim is "dead". Both are actively updated.

I use Vim, hasn't Vim 7.3 been there for ages?

Only a couple of years ago, they increment the point version every few.

Vim 7 added a lot of new features. Bram typical does fix releases for a while and then there is fast and furious to the next version. Vim is definitely still being developed.