Reminds me of an old joke: "Emacs would be a great OS, if only it came with a decent text editor..."
what does it take for this tired and false meme to die?
(And that's without the inevitable implementation of some basic OS functions in elisp by various wizards)
There's https://github.com/whily/yalo apparently
(global-set-key (kbd "M-<tab>") #'completion-at-point-using-chatgpt)Emacs is an interactive lisp environment with at text-oriented interface. Text editing is simply another lisp program that manipulates the interface to work well for this specific task.
Emacs also has a built in email client, RSS reader, IRC client, calculator, file browser, web browser, markup language, regex DSL, Vim emulator, terminal emulator, custom elisp based shell, interactive REPL that works for several programming languages, and probably at least 200 more things that I don't even realize exist yet.
I think this makes it much more than just a text editor for sure. I don't know what you want to call it but operating system doesn't seem too far off the mark even if it's a little hyperbolic.
Chrome and Firefox also have all this stuff, but I don't see people trying to conflate a web browser with an OS. See the difference between ChromeOS[0] and Chrome[1].
Then most of these things are not in "emacs" since most of them are packages and not builtin. That was my point. Emacs is insanely customizable through packages, and can essentially run anything. Chrome and Firefox and any other web browser are also insanely customizable through "packages" which you just so happen to download as soon as you enter the URL to the "package" you want, which we really refer to as a web app. But, that doesn't make the browser an OS, and it doesn't make emacs an OS either.
You might as well try to switch from Notepad to Linux. It's just a type error, and you'll have a bad time.