For me, the big feature in editors is mouseless editing. With emacs my fingers never have to leave the keyboard. When I started out in the Dark Ages, vi offered the same benefit, but multiple buffers were easier in emacs, so I ended up with emacs. I use some emacs extensions (e.g. ctags recently), but that's a secondary benefit.

So from my perspective, you've already gotten most of the benefit just with vi. YMMV. If emacs were to disappear today, I'd probably switch to vi and be perfectly happy.