Seriously try gvim. Not vim where you need a long ass cheat sheet just to create a new tab or move between splits. But gvim where you can be productive and use the mouse and menus when necessary.

The one thing that kills gvim for me is the inability to have one session with multiple windows. I use it anyway.

Try Emacs with vim bindings and you'll have it, its GUI is a client that connects to a server

How would that be better than opening multiple gvim processes?

I want to type :wa in one window, not four windows. I don't want to get an error message when I try to open a buffer that's already open somewhere else, I want it to just move the buffer to the new window (or alternatively, raise the window containing the buffer). I want to move buffers across windows and keep undo history and register contents. TextMate / Emacs / etc. have this capability, but I can't figure out how to do it in vim.