I'd say you are correct in thinking you need a few UNIX tools to make Emacs on Windows comfortable. But maybe it's fewer than you think. I just had to get grep,

I'd say you are correct in thinking you need a few UNIX tools to make Emacs on Windows comfortable. But maybe it's fewer than you think. I just had to get grep, find, diff and now use Emacs on both Linux and Windows and feels almost the same. In fact, that's part of what I love about Emacs: for the most part I don't have to worry about learning how to do stuff on Windows, I just do it in Emacs.