It's not just repetition of say, do this command more times to words. There are more nouns available to apply your verbs to. You can "change a paragraph": `cap`, change the contents of some brackets: `ci(`. I find myself using various permutations of these all the time, and missing them enormously when I'm not in vim. My favourite is `caa` to change an argument in a function call, respecting commas and parens, although that one came in a plugin I think.

I completely agree that often figuring out how many words I want to apply a command to is too much effort; however of course vim has visual selection like any other editor, so I can just press v to begin selecting, then w a few times to move to the beginning of the next word, and then I can apply any of the verbs in my arsenal to the resulting selection.

I find that having the option of <count> repetition is much more useful with large text objects that I can easily subitize. It's very natural for me to delete 3 paragraphs with `d3}` for instance, moreso than selecting them then deleting them.

I think that my very favorite motion in vim might be the `f` key. You use it like `fj` to move to the next occurrence of 'j' on the current line.

I also agree with you that multiple cursors are a much better solution than regexes to the same edit in a few different nearby places. There are multiple selection plugins for vim, but they don't work very well, and I wish it had better support. On the other hand, regexes scale much much better.