[rekado]

I'm still using the GNU system as my OS :) But Emacs is a very important "sub-environment" in my OS; it has a very privileged position in the process tree, much like a browser.

Emacs lacks a couple of features and I think it's fair to say that this represents a limit, but I don't see "the rest of world [...] moving forward" in this area. I don't know of any other system that is as ambitious as Emacs, a system that embraces the overflowing kitchen sink and isn't content with just being called an editor.

Out of the box it's terrible, I give you that. Clunky and dated are too nice for describing the defaults. But underneath the extremely conservative and curmudgeon defaults lies a very flexible environment that cannot be approximated with a set of text applications running inside a terminal emulator. It's a pale shade of the same colour that made Lisp Machines so attractive.