The thing is, you can achieve that functionality whether or not you use Vim/Emacs. The difference is that it won't be so visual, but it turns out that visual clutter gets in the way anyway. So yes, it's harder to get up and running, but it's really efficient once you've settled into an IDE-like environment in Vim/Emacs.

Also, because you've put the glue in place yourself (by hooking up GDB, creating separate windows, running SQL commands as subprocesses, etc.) you've really tailored your environment to your needs. And trust me, once you get to that point, no other IDE will compare.