I've been learning emacs and hunting for the same thing. Aside from Viper mode, these two manual pages are the best I've found:

http://www.gnu.org/s/libtool/manual/emacs/Expressions.html

http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/emacs/Moving-by-P...

It has helped, but I'm still wishing there were more equivalents. This just seems to scratch the surface of what Vim can do in this area. If you find anything else that is helpful for this sort of editing task, please post it here...