Although the OP posted himself, one thing I try to explain to people who don't use Emacs very much is that instead of thinking of it as an editor with a Lisp ex

Although the OP posted himself, one thing I try to explain to people who don't use Emacs very much is that instead of thinking of it as an editor with a Lisp extension language, it's better to think of it as a Lisp environment with a built in editor. And although people jokingly refer to it as an OS (and even the kitchen sink is included -- as an icon), it's really more like a shell. You have a windowing environment, you can integrate other programs including terminal shells, debuggers, etc, etc. Finally, because it is a full Lisp environment, you have 30+ years of accumulated Lisp programs that you can run (some of which have no equal on any platform). I used Emacs for 20 years and while I've strayed away from it (got interested in Vim), I'm slowly making my way back. Not for the Emacs keybindings (which are fine), but for the entire elisp ecosystem. So in a way the OP's imaginings are not so far off (although I don't think you can actually run vim inside emacs -- you will need to use Evil mode instead ;-) ).