Most of Vim users use GVim, and Emacs defaults to a graphical interface.

Not necessarily I believe. That assumption is pretty much community, geography, age, OS, and niche dependent. I use - and have for at least 10 years - a combination of Vim, Tmux, and the usual linux utils under Zsh (I actually used screen for the first few years) for my text editing needs. That being said, I learned Vim in Linux at the same time I was learning C when I was a kid. I've noticed that generally people that started on the Rails bandwagon (which I love btw) or on OSX as their first dev platform use Mvim/Gvim. That said, I've noticed the more "unixy" people using Vim on a terminal. There are exceptions to both rules of course.

Not my intention to get a debate going about this though, just offering a slightly differing point of view.

I don't know why, I actively dislike gvim and use vim exclusively from the command line... even though it has the same functionality.