Of the people I know who prefer Emacs, what they like is the extensibility and customisation, and not necessarily the keybindings.
In fact I'm almost willing to bet that if it was initially designed so as not to require pressing simultaneous keys but only in sequence (like the mechanism used for navigating menus in Windows with the Alt key), Emacs would become even more popular. For example, in many applications I find it much easier and faster to type Alt,F,S to save instead of Ctrl+S.
I use emacs, and prefer its keybindings (probably just due to habit, but I have tried vi[m] a few times and could never get used to the separate modes for text entry and commands). I know enough vi to do simple editing, because emacs isn't always installed on servers, but have used emacs for more than two decades and at this point it's just what I know.
You do know that you can type ESC instead of using the Meta/Alt key, right? So Meta-x can just as well be typed as ESC x, and Meta-Control-s can be typed as ESC Control-s.
This is a backwards-compatible binding for ASCII-only terminals, since ASCII only has control characters, and lacks a Meta or Alt key definition.
(Additionally, if the ESC key is far off, it can usually also be typed by using Control-3. This does not work in a window of a proper graphical Emacs, though, only in a terminal.)
But at the same time, they do become something like second nature, having them mean something different in another application can be annoying. That is what I like about Firemacs.
I, as a Vim user myself, recently saw this and decided to give emacs a try. I still have a long way to go but I have to say that it really does look like it might be the best of both worlds.
Caveat Emptor: I used Vim for a long time, but switched to Emacs about 7 years ago. I still miss Vim, but would not give up Emacs for it.
Many consider Emacs' extension language, Emacs Lisp, to be significantly better than Vim's extension language, VimL. This makes it easier to develop better packages, and also to develop personal extensions/modifications.
This problem has lead to a number of attempts at fixing this:
1. "Evil" is an attempt to port Vim to Emacs, sans VimL. You should see it here: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil. Note: there have been a number of these in the past, and Evil is the latest project successor.
2. "Spacemacs" is an Emacs "distribution" of sorts that is trying to make the entire experience with Evil better: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs
As an Emacs user, I can tell you that Emacs is superior in every way, except perhaps for emulating VI, but even there it's doing a good job. Next question?
Yep, as a 5+ year vim (then nvi) user...emacs was a eye opening text editor and gets way too much hate for no reason...people say emacs is not modal...but everytime you press control, alt, meta, hyper or super, you enter a mode...then every other subsequent key could put you into another mode. It doesnt make sense to vi users at first, but after you swap control with caos lock and a few other adjustments it really is better.
In all seriousness, I was under the impression Emacs was more popular, hence us VIM users being a bit more vocal. It's like the Ron Paul of text editors.
Have you tried VimFx? It's one of the first addons I download (other than uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, and RES).
I like that it's lighter than Pentadactyl/Vimperator and it doesn't break Firefox's default behavior.
Chrome users can download Viumium[1] which does the exact same thing for Chrome.
