I've been wondering about this, as well, and so have been working on an Emacs configuration that makes Emacs work as close as possible to a "normal" text editor

I've been wondering about this, as well, and so have been working on an Emacs configuration that makes Emacs work as close as possible to a "normal" text editor (hopefully allowing learning org-mode without the barrier to entry of Emacs itself): https://github.com/publicus/emacs-org-mode-for-the-laity https://github.com/publicus/emacs-org-mode-for-the-laity