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Personally, it's the double learning curve of having to learn Lisp and Emacs. I understand the basic concepts of Lisp now, but could someone point me to a good introduction to learning Emacs, Slime, and Lisp all at once? Does Practical Common Lisp do that as well?

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You don't have to learn Emacs. Also, Common Lisp isn't the only option. Try Scheme, this one: www.drscheme.org.

http://www.plt-scheme.org/ is the new website.

I feel its wrong for me to push this without at least mentioning that one of my professors wrote Dr. Scheme :-/

The thing with Emacs is that I feel like I am missing out on the full potential of developing in CL if I'm not using it. How true is that?

I don't think it has to be true, though they do go together well. Not all CL hackers use Emacs. You might consider trying the Lispworks IDE, or the Allegro IDE (on Windows) or the Clozure IDE (on Mac).

There are certain things that usually just come with practice, emacs and slime usually seem to fit in that category. Once you have gone through the tutorial most of the time you just look up things or figure them out until you remember what to do in a specific situation.

There probably are some screencasts for introduction to emacs, slime might have some available as well.

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