I don't think it goes at all without saying?! Are all CEOs obliged to use MS Office, arguably inferior editing experience to pure text editing, or be doomed to yakshaving their dotfiles?
Unfortunately there is a misconception that you need a 10kloc init.el to be productive. Worse still are the opinionated configurations targeted at newbs.
emacs out of the box most definitely does not work well. You could say that vim works out of box -- most vi people don't end up customizing their editors up the wazoo like emacs people do at least.
If you're an emacsian, I'm not surprised that you think emacs needs customization for your use. As an emacsian, years ago I decided to stop customizing it, and guess what? Works great for me. So, as you can see, opinions about this differ.
