Following the tutorial worked out as described. I wish more tutorials were this hassle free. One thing, after one has downloaded the IntelliJ and installed the Cursive Plugin, I think the tutorial should also give a few pointers on how to get a REPL going. I had to fumble around a bit cos after a Leiningen project is setup simply clicking the 'Run' menu item does not run the '-main' function and certainly didn't start an REPL session. Thanks for the tutorial.
I'm also an Emacs guy, but I agree with the post's assessment of the complexity of starting out with Emacs vs. another editor.
I prefer Emacs because it is so easy to switch between buffers holding different files, or different places in the same file, because it has keyboard macros, its infinite customizability, Org-Mode, etc., etc.
But that's a lot to learn, and if you are trying to learn Clojure, you should use whatever allows you to focus on the language itself.