I would certainly suggest anyone switching to vim or emacs that they mod the heck out of them, just to make it bearable. You can always peel the mods off once you get more comfortable with the tool. After all, what makes these editors so awesome in the first place, is exactly that you can mod them.
After all, emacs comes out of the box with menus, a toolbar, normal keybinds, to set people at ease if they are used to "normal" text editors like Notepad or Word or something. At least GUI emacs, that is.
I thought that it's after you learn a bit more about emacs that you normally turn all those things off and just rely on commands and key bindings and your own custom modifications.
An aside: In my experience, it also seems like this "newbie-friendly" environment sometimes turns off vim users who consider emacs to be somehow "less hardcore" and therefore worthy of scorn. Which is weird for a few reasons.
I'm pretty much entirely lost in a vanilla emacs installation.
This is actually one of the things which stops me from going too crazy with my emacs customizations. I have a lot (and long ago disabled toolbars, menus, etc.) but occasionally using coworkers' emacs, and using 'zile' on my OpenWRT routers and the like, means that I like to be able to remember the emacs defaults for most of the common things. :)
But once you get past sqrt(15i*π)/2 emacs mastery, you stop using the menus and start using M-x with tab completion. There's a standard naming scheme, and usually local commands are prefixed with the mode name. And in any case, there are generally far more than fit on the menu anyway.
I am one of those rare people that can't use MS Notepad; I routinely get weird dialogs popup in applications because I use emacs key-chords from muscle memory.
That's a disastrous series of commands.
So C-a C-x C-s C-v C-s is just a funny way of saying C-s.