• a graphical file tree browser (with icons, not restricted to ASCII art like NERDTree)
• proportional-width fonts
• a zoomed-out-code mini-map scroll bar
• Plugins written in more mainstream, cleaner languages than Vimscript. Vim does have a plugin interface for some other languages such as Python, but some OSs’ provided Vim installations don’t support those languages, and it’s hard to get a version of Vim with support.
http://www.freehackers.org/VimIntegration
...and plugins can't update things in the background...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/-4pqDJfHCsM%...
etc. I haven't looked at the code myself, but it sounds like a rewrite or major refactor would be very useful.