You gotta be kidding on the sideways text as an important part of the UI. Also adding the vim integration is a waste of time as long as you don't have buffers, registers, ranges and can't parse my .vimrc nor use my modules you might as well not do it.
Well parsing the vimrc might be too much as it would require a full compatibility layer and I highly doubt it'll ever happen. Using vanilla lighttable config wouldn't bother me, even if I have to rewrite most of it. It's a different editor after all.
But yeah, all the "vim" layers around are basically just the bindings, in normal and insert mode which just half of vim. If we can't change buffers with :b, :A or anything, it's just painful as a vim user. Same goes for what you listed.
I have great respect for the guys at code mirror, it's just that I view it as just a quick hack to add vim bindings that a real vim like solution. If LightTable advertises about being vim friendly, there should be an implementation that keeps the vim workflow, not just small bindings.
As a vim user, I'll just skip the "vim" mode if it's done like that (and sadly I'll stick to Vim even if I really crave for a modern "vim" with a decent scripting language).
