1) It's that much better yes. I'm not going to start an endless discussion on text editors vs IDE's, but for an ecosystem designed from the ground up to handle hundreds of related projects with hundreds of contributors with different roles, and huge class libraries with static types, it's a massive productivity boost to have everything integrated (source control, testing, profiler, ...). For languages that aren't in this category (such as C or JavaScript) the story is completely different.

2) The community edition is free.