Plus, with time it becomes more like writing programs and less configuration. I write Elisp commands like I used to write shell scripts. These commands do entirely new things. I feel that can't count as mere configuration.

Yep. Just wrote this today to prettify all the tables in a Markdown file:

    (while (not (eobp))
      (while (not (markdown-table-at-point-p))
        (forward-char 1))
      (markdown-table-align)
      (goto-char (markdown-table-end)))

I'd have no idea how to do this in vim!

A macro and a plugin installed with the markdown-table-align equivalent? Though you could also use this approach with emacs macros too.

In vim I wouldn’t know where to find that markdown-table-align exists nor how to write a macro (and I used vim for much longer than emacs). In emacs I just had to notice that pressing tab in markdown mode aligned tables (among other things), then press C-h k <TAB> to see what function that key invokes, jump to the code for it and start reading.