my number one complaint, whether it be with eclipse, textmate, vim, emacs, whatever, is the clumsiness of going from one file to another and then back to the original
Emacs has a stack for this. Jump to related definition with M-., jump back to where you were before with M-∗. One keystroke is not exactly "clumsy", IMHO.
I, like other posters, would be really psyched if you could have some kind of MVC opener which would automagically open all the code files using a certain view.
I just open all files in the project with `eproject-open-all-project-files`. Then I can iswitchb between them. (Of course, there are lots of extensions that don't require you to have the files open to easily navigate to them; eproject, anything, ido, etc.)