What really helped me get started was using a specific tool/ language. After playing around in Clojure for a while, I learned how to use emacs for a better REPL experience, but I did everything else in Sublime. Most of my school work at the time was in python so I worked on switching that workflow over to emacs. Eventually got pretty comfortable with python too. A few years later and it's now my main editor. It took a few days to figure things out, and a few months to get really comfortable, but I'm now really happy.
I run emacs in window mode and rarely use emacs in the terminal for the same reasons you mentioned. At some point I started using projectile for project management and now I can fuzzy fine files and fuzzy find projects on my system without needing to switch to the terminal. And now if I'm in a terminal, it's probably because I'm using vim on some remote host.