These days many users of vim tend to use many plugins making it in some ways a lot like emacs. Also emacs isn't particularly inefficient on modern machines other then problems with the ui and single threading which I believe vim shares.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_pinky
As a novice Vim user who has at times wanted to try out Emacs, this has always been an irritation. I think it's telling that one of the suggested work-arounds according that article is:
> Emacs' built-in "Viper-mode" that allows use of the vi key layout for basic text editing and the Emacs scheme for more advanced features.
Emacs, especially with paredit, is fairly well optimised for editing s-expressions and the like. Vim is very well optimised for line-based editing, but I don't get on with its buffer management at all.
> underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations
YpVr=
For those that are interested, I would recommend "Practical Vim", and it includes many examples (including the above one) which really accelerate the learning process:
http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim
There are definitely cheaper alternatives (including free ones), but this book really laid the concepts out very clearly for me.