One feature he missed is its not as configurable, and in some situations that is awesome.
So you're doing something weird, manually, but I repeat myself because if it was BAU you'd automate the whole process in puppet or similar. The local vim will work more or less like every other vim out there. Can't really say that with emacs.
If you're traveling somewhere weird, vim is a great travel companion. Not because it can be compiled anywhere (lots of editors can be compiled anywhere) but because it works the same anywhere.
I think Vim is potentially as configurable as Emacs, but it is harder to do after you get past some basic key mappings and a few plugins.
In all my exploring of Emacs, I never saw a .emacs that wasn't completely tricked out with custom stuff that only works for that user.
Because of this, I believe you are correct - it's easier to work in a plain vi environment since we don't typically trick out Vim like our fellow Emacs users do with their environment.
So you're doing something weird, manually, but I repeat myself because if it was BAU you'd automate the whole process in puppet or similar. The local vim will work more or less like every other vim out there. Can't really say that with emacs.
If you're traveling somewhere weird, vim is a great travel companion. Not because it can be compiled anywhere (lots of editors can be compiled anywhere) but because it works the same anywhere.