I mean, find the biggest file you can open with Vim, and then find the biggest file you can open with any other full-fledged editor. I doubt most full-fledged editor will be able to handle a 5GB+ log file, much less perform a search / replace within a reasonable amount of time.

Vim just has a lot less going on under the hood by default and is built for this.

In short, I guess I'm agreeing with your original post. Vim is just on another level when it comes to performance versus other editors so it's kind of unfair to pit them together.