I have to agree. Emacs w/ Evil is a nice solution and gets almost there, but there are enough edge cases that interfere with the elegance of pure Vim. Everytime you install a new emacs plugin, you have to consider that it will use Emacs keybindings, not Vim, and you jump through hoops to remedy that, or, more often, you find yourself having to mix the emacs ways and the Vim way, which I personally found annoying after awhile.

Emacs is awesome and more powerful overall, but actually using Vim is easier -- from setting up keybindings, configuring your vimrc file, it's all quite simple compared to what you can do, and often do, in setting up Emacs.

But to be honest they are much closer to each other than either is to a more conventional/modern IDE. They are spiritual siblings for sure.