Incremental Search - This can be incredibly slow on large files and/or network mounted files. It can also interact with line wrapping and highlight search to slow vim to a crawl. So I think it makes sense to leave it off.

Tabs - That's the way god intended it. Stop trying to force your indentation width on me.

Stable working directory - This is how every text editor I'm aware of works. I can see use cases where you might want to change it manually or automatically, but I don't want to have to guess which directory I'm in every time I open a file.

Even some seeming no brainers like turning syntax highlighting on can be terrible because it doesn't work well with dark backgrounds or other random colour schemes.