Right. I believe this is the main idea here; two ideas representing a culture. Marshall Mcluhan was quite right about these global electronic communities.

From using both over a span of a year I have to say that I enjoy both.

Within emacs I can set up an email retrieval, client, notifications, etc, etc with less than 40 lines of elisp. Unification is easy to achieve.

Yet the same can be true within a shell environment. More similarities than differences exist from what ive seen. Which the joke on emacs vs vim appears to be a strawman; its more of a case of shell vs emacs. Each are command processors yet go through slightly different means to use them.