Also, emacs is another computing environment, and one has to be quite explicit about interacting with the rest of the computing environment (for example, there are emacs plugins for email, a web-browser, directory browser) and that embodies the spirit of emacs to integrate (which means reinvent) everything.

I used emacs a bit, and liked it, but I prefer the shell. I is unix, and emacs and unix come from two different computing cultures.