I still use exclusively Vim for all my clojure coding. I have Vim in one window (with VimClojure for syntax highlighting and some other features), a REPL in another (for quick experimenting), and my ant script in another for compiling and testing the whole thing. It's not as integrated as SLIME and emacs, but I don't feel like my tools are slowing me down significantly.

With Emacs(w/paredit)+SLIME you would be doing "interactive development" which is really a fundamentally different and better way of using Lisp. I cannot recommend it enough.

This is exactly how I work with Clojure. Emacs is not required to develop in Clojure.

I've been using clojure for a while now (nothing huge LOC-wise, but it's a pretty significant part a large system). I use vim, and haven't had any troubles. The clojure REPL doesn't seem to have readline support, but it works fine with the rlwrap program. I've been meaning to learn emacs to try out the niftier select and execute functionality that it has, but vim does work for me.

There's a few scripts to help you out:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2501

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531

I'm a huge Emacs fan, but I'd recommend against learning Emacs and Clojure at the same time. While the tight REPL integration can be difficult to set up in vim, you can use a separate REPL/editor environment to get going, and then ease yourself into a more integrated environment once you get a little more familiar with things.

This is a great place to look for several IDE's and guides to getting started with VIM.

http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/clojure/Getting_Started

You can modify Emacs to mimic Vim, which might be help you bridge the gap:

http://www.sanityinc.com/articles/vim-vs-emacs

You can even try it online: http://ideone.com/l7Nqw