And you can use the built-in emacs features via emacs -nw on a remote system. Core vim doesn't come with a git client I assume? So I'm not seeing the difference

And you can use the built-in emacs features via emacs -nw on a remote system. Core vim doesn't come with a git client I assume? So I'm not seeing the difference. The other answer is apt-get install emacs-core-plus-standard-packages or apt-get install emacs-core emacs-magit emacs-org-mode i.e. people produce linux packages that set up emacs with its MELPA packages. If we don't put stuff like org-mode and magit in emacs then the community will produce emacs distributions bundling the standard add-ons.