I try to stress this more than anything when talking about the merits of vim/emacs/etc. It's not about speed, it's about how effortless and 2nd nature editing text becomes.

Which is really counterintuitive when you look at how complicated the programs are. But I felt that it became better/easier than regular text editing after only 3 weeks of fulltime use. The uninterrupted flow of keyboard use, and reduced mouse navigation, feels great.

You only need to learn a very small subset of features to be very effective with it. Some people just stick to that forever. But you can also slowly add to it.