Even if e-cigs are equally harmful on a per-quantity basis (which I'm still somewhat skeptical of), an advantage over regular cigarettes is that you can consume less than one full cigarette at a time.
I went to an 80 year old's birthday party recently and he has been smoking since WW2 or thereabouts. His advice - get a pipe and buy tobacco from a proper tobacconist. In that way he avoids all the chemical horrors of regular hand rolling tobacco. Normally this stuff has flavours in it, stuff to make it burn and stuff to keep it moist. The difference is huge.
My advice to the government is to ban adulterated tobacco products so only dry rolling tobacco is for sale. Then to apply a minimum age to buy tobacco with this age rising one year every other year. In a relatively short period of time tobacco will become as rare as pipe smoking is.
Pipe tobacco isn't that much "safer", either.
So even if I smoke 30% more than I used to I'm probably consuming significantly less harmful chemicals in the end, including nicotine. Which means it will probably be easier to quit vaping than cigarettes, especially as I could taper the nicotine percentage from 6mg -> 0mg over a period of time without adjusting behaviour.
On the other hand I hardly ever felt any vapour smell from e-cigarettes.
Also... Smoke is a mixture of gas and solid materials, while vapour is a mixture of gas and liquid.
I think using precise terms in a debate brings extra clarity into it, so instead of inventing poetic proxy terms, like e-smoke, let's just use the more commonly understood word "vapour" instead.
I knew a friend with a much, much worse smell allergy where a smell of the right color dye would cause seizures and possibly kill them.
To combat this, tobacco companies put some sugar on the filter tip and I believe better tobacco in the very tip of the cigarette, this way the first hit is better than all of the others.
It might just be the placebo effect that makes it taste better after, but who cares?
I read a study showing that the absorption rate of nicotine is about half through an e-cigarette, because of other chemicals in normal cigarettes that increase the rate.