Fast, unless you happen to have very very long lines and word wrap enabled.

Syntax highlighting in very large files is what kills it for me. I usually open very very large files in literal mode to avoid lag

Minimalist? Really now.

It's basically a Lisp machine runtime that happens to include a built-in text editing window.

Compared to the likes of Visual Studio, Eclipse, or Sublime, though, it's certainly minimalist. The typical "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" joke is a bit quaint nowadays.

Well, it depends on what you compare it with. IDEA, Visual Studio, Eclipse, you know. Of course, comparing to nano and nvi, Emacs isn't so much minimalist - but hey, did you ever try to run Emacs with no elisp packages?

Comparing Emacs with ed is a point in ed's favor, sure.

Ditto Emacs and Notepad, or nano.

Comparing Emacs with anything else is more likely to look favorable to Emacs.