Interesting to see. The Vim people at work are constantly harrasing us two Emacs users, claiming that lisp is old and silly, and that vimscript is good. Maybe change is acoming.
I just wanted best of all worlds: My favourite editor with my favourite syntax without sacrificing any performance. If anything, my dotfiles should be faster now since there's less VimL which is damn slow to execute. I haven't benchmarked it though.
The Clojure world in Vim is getting better and better too thanks to various projects. My attempt at that is https://github.com/Olical/conjure
We also have really good s-expression editing plugins! Come on in, the water is full of parens :D
Maybe I don't get out enough.
The Neovim team found that Lua seems to do both pretty well and has a fast implementation (LuaJIT), so they're trying to get Lua to be Neovim's primary extension language. Python and Javascript also seem to be popular languages for Neovim extensions.