As a vim-er and not an Emacs-er, asking genuinely and not out of snark, surely Emacs is eminently non-modal (at least, not modal in the same way that vim is)?
emacs has plenty of modes, although actually that's not really my big problem with emacs (or vim) when I think more about it. It's needing to remember stuff rather than recognize and select (which is the fundamental advantage of GUI, if you don't like remembering things).
Most of the stuff I see vim/emacs-ers boast about are easily achievable by me with a mouse or so obscure that I'd never remember them when I needed them. But that's me. Some people are good at and/or like remembering shortcuts.
And what you said that most of the stuff that are easily achievable with a mouse, try to do equivalent things like this in SECONDS: http://emacsrocks.com/. Well, that's why my co-workers work so hard why I have time to enjoy other things during my daily work.
What you said, like many other people who didn't learn Emacs properly or left it for so long that don't know what Emacs is currently capable of, is seriously outdated.
You should have a look at my post in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8639804 to see what Emacs is capable of that I could never find in any other editors, and even IDEs.
This is not the sense in which vim is called a modal editor—at least, I think of it as meaningfully different. In different Emacs major modes, for example, the tab key might create different indentations; but, in different vim modes, the 'x' key might remove a character (in normal mode) or insert an 'x' character (in insert mode).
I think of the statement "vim is a modal editor" as "vim replaced key chords with mode toggles"—a different editor would replace "press 'x' in normal mode" by something like "press 'M-x'."
Again, I am certainly aware that Emacs modes can do much more than just offer context-sensitive indentation, but my impression (as a non-Emacs-er) is that they are usually meant to offer subtle customisation rather than full-scale re-engineering of the editor.
- File/directory browsing (think Norton Commander) - Email client (several of them) - Terminal (vt100) - Remote file browsing/editing (think WinSCP, Cyberduck) - Games (Sokoban, Tetris)
It's not "subtle".
I don't mean to suggest that Emacs can't be made into a modal editor—saying "Emacs can't do that" is good only as a reverse-psychology tactic to convince someone to make Emacs do that—but rather that it is not "by its nature" such; that is, that someone is unlikely to choose Emacs, over vim say, because it can be made modal.