I don't think anyone would argue that Sublime Text has a much nicer GUI than anything Vim has. It's just lots of little things, like how scrolling is smooth and quick, not entire lines popping into/out of view. The zoomed out source map is also nice.

It's also ever so slightly snappier. Vim seems to be ever so slightly less responsive when I have several panes open.

Well, I can explain how I use it. I have my Sublime in legacy mode, which enables some vim like controls. And I benefit from Sublimes super fast text rendering, it's nice fonts and colors, the way it integrates with my desktop environment, how fast it interacts with plugins that spawn popups and analyze my code.

And then every once in a while I need to do some cool text transformation, and it doesn't work, so I launch a terminal, edit the file in Vim and work my magic. Then I exit Vim and continue in Sublime. Ideal? No.. but it's the usability of Sublime with the features of Vim.. every once in a while..

"99% feature loss" sounds terrible but vim is actually way too featureful, in the sense that all that shit gets in the way of just using it as a text editor. The amount of silly pointless knowledge you need just to move around lines and save a file is a real burden.