You're comparing an editor to an Integrated Development Environment. It's really apples and oranges. The pure editor part of VS (and most IDE's) is probably wo

You're comparing an editor to an Integrated Development Environment. It's really apples and oranges. The pure editor part of VS (and most IDE's) is probably worse than emacs/vim. However, you do not get refactoring, profiling, source-control, code-sensitive completion and all that other jazz that IDE's provide, all in one package and in more-or-less the same interface. Sure, there's probably plugins for vim/emacs that do all of these, but do they all work together well and how much time/expertise do you need to set them up. Now that doesn't necessarily make an IDE better, I fully expect some people do code faster/better in vim than in VS, but it certainly provides a lot of added value/features.