I generally like that setup better as well, but imo one of the advantages of the emacs approach is that there is more of a culture of providing extensive API hooks for scripting. If you run an RSS reader inside emacs, it's expected that it'll expose many/most of its operations via elisp function entry points, so what's going on in the reader is "transparent" in a sense: scripts can query the list of feeds, the items within the feed, the read/unread status of items, can grab the text of items, can trigger re-fetches, etc. And you can integrate that with a bookmarks manager, outgoing email, whatever.

Most tabbing window managers also provide a pretty good scripting interface, but the programs you run inside them tend to be more opaque. If you run the ncurses RSS reader 'newsbeuter' in a window, your WM scripts can't easily interact with a running instance, short of screenscraping its output and sending it raw keystrokes as input, because it doesn't expose any kind of API.