> * super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX.

Sounds like you should try ivy and its companions. Ivy offers fuzzy matching for all operations in Emacs (e.g., switching buffers, opening files, looking up documentation) and the counsel packages (e.g., counsel-rg) use that same interface to interact with external tools such as ripgrep or git grep.

Ivy has completely taken over my Emacs experience, and it did not require a lot of configuration, just a few keybindings.

As for a terminal, I don't have a Windows machine to test, but `M-x ansi-term` is pretty much exactly like a regular terminal: you can run any program in it, including htop or even vim.