Ctrl-z followed by killall -9 vim is how I usually exited vim.
I once pissed off dozens of customers by symlinking vim to emacs on one of our shell servers (back when isps gave you login access to a Linux/Unix box...
(Yes, it wasn't very nice, but it was funny)
You need i, escape, :w! and !wq. hjkl too if you're feeling fancy. But i, escape, :w! and !wq is all you need to use Vim. I know because I used it like that for two years in college.