> Well technically Emacs is just a Lisp interpreter with some text editing facilities by default. With evil-mode it is just as modal as vim throughout.

I don't mean to suggest that Emacs can't be made into a modal editor—saying "Emacs can't do that" is good only as a reverse-psychology tactic to convince someone to make Emacs do that—but rather that it is not "by its nature" such; that is, that someone is unlikely to choose Emacs, over vim say, because it can be made modal.

Emacs can make Vim a subset of it. You should check spacemacs: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs. It was made by Vimmers and is ambitious: it wants to replace not only the "editor" inside Emacs, but also rebind everything else to Vim's convention. Evil-mode can do everything in Practical Vim, I was told by a Vim user switched to Emacs.

Well, the EVIL-mode is used by a lot of people who want the features of GNU Emacs and a modal interface. If you search around there are several people with detailed reports why and how they switched to a modal GNU Emacs.