[dasil003]

I'm a long-time vim user, and I use the esc for two reasons. First, because it's critical muscle memory, and if I go to a machine that is not my own don't want to be crippled. I would still consider remapping caps lock (as opposed to .vimrc remapping) since that would work when ssh'ed into arbitrary machines, but the problem there is I'm already using it for control, and because the control key is resized on the laptop keyboard I can't develop normal muscle memory when moving between different apple keyboards.

Personally I think people make way too big a deal about the escape key being difficult to hit. It's right there in the corner, never been a problem for me.