Using Emacs is a bit of a paradigm shift in text editing, so you should expect a bit more work up front for great results later on. Going through the tutorial and learning the basic vocabulary and commands takes care of most of that up-front cost and should not take long. I think it took me less than two weeks of fairly casual use.
Part of the beauty is that most of the things in the blog are not limited to Python. All the general text-editing stuff trivially transfers to other languages you may want to learn. And Emacs supports any language you do want to learn to one extent or the other. For some languages, Emacs is even the only option!
So you should consider going through at least the beginning of all this even if you're not interested in Python per se.
Also, check out some of the Emacs Rocks![1] videos. I keep on recommending them because they are awesome. They really show off why Emacs is truly magical.