I'm one of those people that stays in emacs all day, and you're right that the Windows port is basically useless on it's own. I use the emacs-w32 package from C

I'm one of those people that stays in emacs all day, and you're right that the Windows port is basically useless on it's own. I use the emacs-w32 package from Cygwin (it is a real GUI emacs that doesn't require an X server but also integrates with the Cygwin environment) though, and that has gotten me productive on lots of corporate workstations where running desktop Linux is out of the question.