How so? I haven't used VS since a couple of versions ago and never got to know it very well, so I based my above comment on the OPs description; if there's more to the feature than I could easily be wrong.

Global search and replace casts a wide net, makes tons of mistakes, requires you to inspect every change to ensure it was correct; automated refactorings don't make any mistakes no matter the size of the code base. These two things are vastly different.

You don't review automated refactorings?

Actually in jetbrains IDEs you preview your automated refactoring, before it happens. It will show you which files will be affected and how, and then you can choose whether to exclude specific instances or not.

Code review happens anyway, automated refactor or not

You certainly can; however, you'll stop after a while when you realize it actually works.

The vim command is doing a search and replace over all text - Rename in Visual Studio will restrict the change to class/method/.... name definitions and calls to them.

Ah, so instead of having to hand-roll your own really complex regex that would limit the scope every time, VS automatically limits the scope of the renaming for you. That is pretty nice.

It isn't about limiting scope, it's about parsing and understanding the language. A refactor can change every file in your project (for example, renaming a global variable named 'i').

And, yes, it is very nice. Eclipse comes close with Java but, last I tried Vim and Emacs refactoring plugins, they were nowhere near as good or even very discoverable/usable).

No, you operate on different levels. A regex replace works on the text of your source files, a refactoring rename in Visual Studio or Eclipse works on the symbol.