My personal preference is vim in a quake-style terminal (yakuake on linux or iTerm2's hotkey window in OS X) with a minimal amount of transparency so that I can "read through" the terminal and see whatever's in the browser/document window behind. After getting this set up, it's going to take a lot for me to switch back to an IDE full time.
And yeah - gotta love screen/tmux.
I personally try to use a minimal number of plugins. Command-t is the only one I use daily. I gave eclim a shot for java stuff, but ultimately found I didn't use it very often. It's better to just not fight "the vim way," though I definitely see how that's a barrier.
My job forced me to get over that, and though I can still appreciate a good GUI-based editor I don't feel any need to switch to one anymore.
I just use vim inside tmux, but that's mostly because I have to write a significant amount of code on a remote machine via ssh.
Also, I will say that even as a dedicated vim user I wouldn't be thrilled to use vim without a large number of plugins that more or less just offer features something like Sublime Text can offer natively, like a decent file tree browser. So a vim mode in Sublime Text can make the barrier to entry lower by reducing the need for the modern programmer to load up vim with plugins.