It is (IMHO) exactly how a GUI-based text editor should act. Simple and unintrusive in normal use, with enough power under the hood (and accessible via UI) to do the tougher stuff. I still miss some of the things I could do easily in it, even with emacs 23.
As for the article's comments on emacs, the mistake is in assuming emacs is an application. It's not. It's a lisp environment that's been shaped for text editing. The configuration interface is terrible because you're not really supposed to use it. Instead, you shove programmatic commands into .emacs to bend it to your will.
Friends and I brag about the length, complexity, and age of our .emacs files... maybe we should get out more... but you get the idea.
There are so many things in Vim that 'just make sense', at least to my way of thinking. Things like tabs. Why is it that in Emacs you can't just define a soft tabstop of 4 spaces? Why do I have to define a list of column numbers? Don't get me wrong, the idea that I could manually define a bunch of column numbers so that the tabstops were uneven for a particular application would is cool... by why can't I just say "every 4th column is a tabstop" and have Emacs apply that until infinity columns? And there is the lack of things like Vim's ":set list" mode to quickly visualize if a bunch of spacing consists of tabs, spaces or a mixture (and to quickly figure out where trailing whitespaces are).
These are all things that I can get on default Vim without any configuration. I'm sure these are all programmable in Emacs -- it is a full-on lisp engine afterall -- but it's too steep of a climb for me (or at least has been thus far) when I'm already productive with Vim.
Even better, if you don't like the way anything's indented, move the cursor to that spot and hit C-c C-o and it'll tell you why it's indented that line that way, and you can adjust those parts as you wish.
If you're not in cc-mode, then.. it's lisp. Repeating sequences of multiples of 4 are pretty easy to write in a function that generates them.
(• This isn't a diss of Vim or Emacs, btw, just that they're both rather less "OS X era" than either BBEdit or Textmate -- but that's often a strength)