[glurgh]

I think it's partially a cultural thing and partially, the fact that one is an editor and the other one a bit closer to a lifestyle choice. Even if you just google them and read the snippets - vim will tell you that it's a vi clone and looking for vi will say "vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system."

Emacs will tell you it's an "extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor." That's quite a mouthful, especially if all you had in mind was to edit some text. And I say this with all the nostalgic affection of a long-time emacs user.