I prefer tabs way more than spaces. It's faster to indenting back and better for search regexps, quite an important point for me. With Vim it's easy to retab a text if needed anyway.
the indenting commands work the same way in vim with tabs or spaces -- either select a visual range and hit >, or hit >a} to indent a brace delimited block, or... well, you know the drill. the > or < compose in the same way you'd expect any other vim command to do.
With vim you need sts. It lets you you backspace over spaces just like tabs. Now I never need tabs anymore.
I don't understand your point about search regexps.
Thanks for the softtabstop tip, that was a life saver as I'm forced to used spaces. For the regexps I'm used to search for tabs to distinguish lvalues but two spaces are the same for that patterns.