I guess it's a question of how much you want to invest in your tools. Learning vi and emacs is like a lifetime of compound interest.

I agree that if you just want to code something yesterday, you probably won't reach for these most powerful tools. I'd say that if you're committed to programming over the long-term, though, you'd be hamstringing yourself by not starting on them now.

Long story short, I started Emacs a few months ago and I'm never going back.