I stopped reading after (1). Nice rant otherwise. You might want to review your numbers though. Those of us who work in Java or C# probably earn a lot more than $35 an hour. And those IDEs really don't need 24 GB or RAM.
I don't think the author intended to insult Java/C# developers. He just gave an extreme example to show that a good IDE will pay it self back.
Notepad++. Open source, has a bunch of plugins and its light. I tried a few ide(s) and most of them are way to much resources demanding for what they offer. Eclipse has a lot to offer, if you are an eclipse ninja you probably will benefit from using it. Aptana is also quite popular, but when i launch it and need to wait for it to load, it just kills my motivation to start coding.