First off, the emacs community widely agrees that xah is insane. I recommend not linking newbies to his site.

Secondly, I disagree about Emacs' learning curve. You can immediately open a file, start typing (with syntax highlighting, etc.), save it, etc. all without ever needing to know anything about emacs. Just use the menubar or toolbar like in any GUI application.

Once you decide Emacs is decent, then you can invest in learning the key bindings and the advanced features. Emacs comes with very good documentation, and it's self-documenting. So if you accidentally press a key and like what it does, you can can C-h k <that key command again> and get detailed information on that command.

And of course, elisp makes it very easy to extend emacs. Emacs makes programming in elisp quite enjoyable, even though elisp is definitely Not Perl.

YMMV, but vi will never have the level of documentation and extension ability that emacs does.