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.