There is a point when convenience for lazy developers becomes bloat. Emacs is probably at that point - a runtime feature-full enough that you can get both a web browser, mail/news reader, presumably an irc client as well as a half-decent editor in a few tens of megabytes. Significantly more than a small talk runtime, that fits it's own blitter, dcvs and full IDE in under 10 MB.

What does the order of magnitude really gain the end user? A slower, less powerful GUI system?