I use evil-mode myself. And yes, it's definitely a crazy franken-editor, but I prefer it to dealing with vim's API. I wish that "." respected the previous visual mode, though. Makes indentation a pain.

Although I use VIM pretty much exclusively and haven't really used EMACS in a while, I have been impressed with LaTeX mode in EMACS and wish that was the way things worked in VIM.

My guess is that you get some areas where it is a crazy franken-editor and some areas where it may actually be pretty cool.