vim users generally attempt to construe vim's smaller feature set *as* a feature, proclaiming that Emacs is "bloated" and "fat" and "slow", an example of "creeping featurism", mocking it for including the proverbial kitchen sink, which, in their view, is completely unnecessary. Why, they want to know, is it necessary for a text editor to come with a module for interfacing with ISO networked coffee makers? (Answer: because it's possible.) But there is not really any question as to which editor is the more featureful; if featurefulness is your standard for quality, then Emacs reigns completely supreme. Emacs has text editing features I miss in OpenOffice, navigation features I miss in Firefox, and customizeability out the royal wazootie -- among other things.

The difference is one of viewpoint. The vim users just want a text editor, pretty much. Emacs users aren't satisfied with that: they want everything. vim users see some of Emacs' more excessive features as "unnecessary" bloat. To the Emacs user, however, features are desirable even if not strictly necessary. If every feature had to be justified as strictly necessary, the Emacs user reasons, why do we even need computers, when typewriters were working just fine? The vim user doesn't see things this way; he views the ability to edit his stuff without retyping it as necessary, but he views the ability to transparently edit remote files (accessed via ssh perhaps) in the same editor as local files as unnecessary; for that he would just shell out, scp the file, edit it, and scp the changes back. (Which is basically what tramp does, behind the scenes; tramp is the Emacs thingydoo for editing remote files as if they were local.) The vim user does not consider decoding morse code to be something he would do in his text editor -- why would he? The Emacs user, OTOH, knows that, of *course* Emacs would have the ability to do that. (The command is called unmorse-region. Assuming you don't have it bound to a key, you'd access it via M-x.) To the vim user, playing Zork in a text editor buffer is a fundamentally preposterous notion -- but Emacs users have malyon.