I think it's a common misconception that Emacs is not a collection of simple tools. There are two major differences: Emacs' "shell" is the ELisp interpreter, n

I think it's a common misconception that Emacs is not a collection of simple tools. There are two major differences: Emacs' "shell" is the ELisp interpreter, not (eg) bash; and, Unix uses the whitespace-separated text stream as its common language, and Emacs uses the text buffer. There are analogous tools in both environments, although in Emacs, most of the "little language"-driven tools use ELisp instead, giving simpler cooperation. There's a lot of truth in the "Unix is just a device driver collection for Emacs" model though: there's little need for most of the Unix toolset if you're adept at Emacs. I think there's a much more interesting discussion to be had in comparing the relative merits of text streams (Unix) vs text buffers (Emacs) as a unifying abstraction for a suite of programmer's tools.