I started using vim before switching to emacs, and my experience was that just installing evil-mode and then picking up any normal emacs tutorial was enough - I

I started using vim before switching to emacs, and my experience was that just installing evil-mode and then picking up any normal emacs tutorial was enough - I skipped all of the editing specific stuff and got the interesting stuff from the rest. You might want to try that. Actually, your question made me realize that the interesting part of vim is the modal editing interface, while the interesting part of emacs is everything but the text editing bits. So, focus on those. Does that help, or have you already tried this?