Emacs is really more of a programming platform than a standard single-function application. It doesn't make sense to compare it to Unix apps like wc or ls. It's

Emacs is really more of a programming platform than a standard single-function application. It doesn't make sense to compare it to Unix apps like wc or ls. It's more similar to Bash, which allows you to combine built in functions and a whole host of separate programs (awk, sed etc). Put another way, Emacs makes it easy to process text files, combining the built-in features and modes of Emacs with just about any Unix command-line tool (via M-x shell-command-on-region, or simply by processing the file from a terminal and passing the result back to Emacs). Word, on the other hand, makes it easy to do fancy word processing and associated formatting tasks inside Word, but makes it very difficult to share the resulting file with other programs (even different versions of Word).