Agreed. I'm fairly proficient in VIM, and I'd love to extend my knowledge of emacs as well - but there's few tutorials that don't start with "change these 15 settings and install these 5 plugins, then use it like this..."
I've tried the evil mode : emacs now behave like vim in text edit mode, with nearly less complication than installing a plugin for vim. Can be found here : http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home
