Not that this is particularly relevant to anything, but AFAIK even back then Linus was using MicroEMACS, not gnu emacs.

Having said that, I agree that people are generally discounting rms' immense contributions* a bit too easily here.

* (both technical contributions and in terms of just the entire culture of open source, which he really helped shape in a very significant way, and I say that as someone who mostly dislikes the GPL and prefers MIT/BSD style licenses)