I use the windowed Mac version most of the time, and touchpad scrolling is so slow that it's basically not a reasonable way to get around a file. Compare to Sublime, where it's silky smooth, and you can get an almost physical feeling of where things are, which makes zipping around using scrolling very effective.
I run my shell inside emacs (which is super nice -- how do people survive not having easy immediate access to command output)? But if a command is going to generate a lot of output (e.g., if I have the misfortune to be running mvn), I'll need to either drop back to terminal or redirect the output to a file, or be content with my command slowing down 100x to wait for emacs to render the output.
Try opening a file that happens to contain a very long line (this happens sometimes w/ generated code, or json data, or ...). Emacs will basically freeze, due to some N^2 in line length algorithm somewhere.
It's no easy task, but I do think it's possible to make something w/ the near-infinite, excellent flexibility of emacs, while also hitting a much higher speed and quality bar.
Scrolling sounds like a terrible way to get around a file. I'd much rather be presented with a prompt to go to a named "section" with completion (an actual section in a prose document, or a function definition in a program), or to search for some text. Or, if I don't have a specific target in mind and I want an overview of the file, I prefer pagination to scrolling.
But... I wonder how much my preference is conditioned by years of Emacs and its subpar scrolling? My preference for pagination+search extends to other software; to browsers, for example (spacebar or ctrl+f over mouse-wheel), but is that just a habit I got from my constant Emacs usage (I typed this comment in Emacs)?
In emacs, I mostly navigate around by searching, or sometimes by outlining (hide all lines that aren't a definition, move to definition, unhide).
But I do remember before I became an emacs addict, and there was something very nice about having a physical sense of your file layout. If you have that sense, scrolling can an efficient way to navigate a file (well, up to a certain size, anyway).
And I think there's something valuable in the almost subconscious feeling for the layout of the file you get as you scroll thru it.
When I'm mostly in emacs, my sense of what a file "is" is much hazier, because I'm just warping from one place to another.
(On the other hand, maybe the entire concept of a file as a linear progression is antiquated for source code...)
it's true in the sense that it's true for almost anything once you start to add a plugin or two or add personal customizations.
The only thing for me that is actually consistently, superfast is terminal vim without any plugins. Which is too barebones for my daily use.
In a realistic, daily working environment with all my stuff loaded emacs is clunky, but not necessarily slow. It's honestly still pretty responsive.