Maybe, but it would also cause complete havoc, because the "standard GUI" keybindings conflict with enormous swathes of Emacs standard keybindings (remember, so

Maybe, but it would also cause complete havoc, because the "standard GUI" keybindings conflict with enormous swathes of Emacs standard keybindings (remember, some of them conflict with Emacs key prefixes...), and Emacs has a lot of keybindings. Once you've started to move stuff around, the conflicts cascade, and there's simply no easy way to recover, especially as many keybindings are made in 3rd-party packages, over which there's little control. Given that there's actually a rather small number of "standard GUI" keybindings, it actually seems much more tractable to simply ask people to relearn those. It simply isn't a huge burden compared to the alternative... The sort of people who would be completely loathe to relearn the few "standard GUI" bindings will probably use the mouse/menus instead anyway (and I've observed many newbies happily using Emacs without ever touching the keyboard except when entering text!).