I prefer Emacs, but sometimes think Vim works better on laptops as everything is right under your fingers. Emacs is much more comfortable on a full-size keyboard. So I wonder whether there's any correlation between Emacs/desktop and Vim/laptop.
I have tiny hands and when I tried (still trying every now and then) to learn Emacs, I found it difficult to execute its keyboard commands. Trying it on a mechanical keyboard was even worse.
As "buy an expensive keyboard to possibly make learning emacs easier" is the advice of the mad, I would suggest that you be fearless in rebinding things. Learning the default bindings is far less important than learning the functionality of emacs and how to extend and customise it.