I'm in the process of converting to emacs after about 6 years of vim - I find just having a daemon launch at startup and always having a frame open is fine once you get into the mindset of sending whatever you're editing to that frame instead of just editing it in the session you're in. I actually kind of prefer it now because when I used vim I never really took advantage of multiple buffers. I'd just open, edit and close.

One thing that's eluded me howver is being able to have graphical and terminal emacs work with the same daemon.