I'm not a fan of the religion either. If you develop large projects, you'll probably find the power of emacs to be a huge time saver. Instead of having 4 terminals open, each with a vim session (something I typically see), you can just have 4 windows open. Tramp is also really slick for easily editing remote files. Having a python interpreter in running in conjunction with your editor is slick too. Probably worth fighting with for a few days to get it. If you still don't like it, now you know why!
well, the thing with these comparisons between vim and emacs features is that they mostly come down to "do you know how to do feature X" because both emacs and vim (vim, not vi) will surely have feature X somewhere.
In this case, vim allows tabs and split windows and the Tramp functionality is built in. I'm not sure about the python terminal, but then again, I've never felt the need.
Yes, that's it. A couple of times I've imagined a really cool feature that vim could have... and it turned out it already has it ... along with additional features and extensions to that idea that I hadn't begun to imagine... whoa... That's a rare and impressive experience (for me), and it gave vim a special place in my heart.
But I agree with you that the same thing would be true of emacs too.
Vim is a huge mess/mass of features, and if you don't already know about a feature, the help isn't very helpful (googling works better). Emacs scripting is probably more regular, being based on a full language.
Just sayin.