I think you might be misinterpreting the target user base of emacs and vi, though. Maybe I'm off on this, but I never saw them as general-purpose text editors. Of course there should be text editors like that, but emacs and vi were for the power-users, the sort of people who don't mind tackling a giant learning curve if the result is that they can do really complicated things more quickly and precisely than a person using some normal editor can. Granted, that means that emacs and vi shouldn't be the default editors for any system, but you know... It's not that they suck, it's just that they're not FOR you.