Quite some years later, I don't think I could ever do without vim. Not saying that emacs wouldn't probably fill the same role, editor wars considered and all. I just had somebody tell me to pick an editor and get good with it, some blog or forum posting made me go with vim and it's been one of my favorite pieces of software since.
To contribute a little bit, what I've really come to learn recently is the 'hybrid line numbering mode' that was added with 7.4 iirc. When you add both. set relativenumber
set number
to your .vimrc, you get relative numbers for all lines except the current, which is displayed as absolute. Helped my navigation game a huge deal. Just in the unlikely case anyone here hadn't heard of it.