These days a lot of us essentially use vi in emacs so this is just not true anymore.

I used "Dired" to view text files and move around directories all the time in emacs. Replaced "mc" (midnight commander) for me. Partly because were I'm at MC takes about 30 seconds to start. you can M-x shell and get a shell in emacs, but that's overkill... but it would be searchable....

emacs even has games.. M-x tetris.

I'm starting to think you might be right about it being an OS.

It has viper-mode