I know this is the joke, and I know Evil is the jokey reply, but ... both sides of the joke carry a grain of truth, as good jokes do.
I know a lot of people become comfortable with the default editing tools in Emacs, and many of them are good, but on the whole, vanilla Emacs does not ship with a great editor.
The Vim family makes up amazingly well designed editors.
Evil is a Vim implementation in Emacs. It is the best of both worlds, and not just on paper. It actually works.
Not ever remotely true. Emacs has one of the best plain and structured text editing ever known to humans. Buffer abstraction alone is a godsend. Indirect buffer editing allows you to edit any piece independently - e.g. I can edit code comments treating them as completely different thing - with different highlighting, fonts, behaviors, etc.
In what editor can you peak&edit folded text without unfolding it? Answer - only Emacs.
Ask someone who needs to write texts in Arabic or Hebrew - Emacs has far, far better RTL support.
Org-mode is just light-years ahead of anything else, nothing even comes close to it.
So, your stupid joke (if you really believe it) is on you, truly.
I know a lot of people become comfortable with the default editing tools in Emacs, and many of them are good, but on the whole, vanilla Emacs does not ship with a great editor.
The Vim family makes up amazingly well designed editors.
Evil is a Vim implementation in Emacs. It is the best of both worlds, and not just on paper. It actually works.