One of the problems is that it's a terrible Lisp and runtime. If it was at least a Scheme, there would be less complaining. Also, Lisps aren't popular, as you surely know.
The display technology assumes a text terminal, just like vim. There are many things you can't do with that which are easy with a proper GUI.
Actually the Lisp runtime of GNU Emacs is not terrible. It's just that there are a few better in the Lisp world. Some of the things in Emacs Lisp are there by design.
> The display technology assumes a text terminal,
GNU Emacs and Xemacs have a lot of support for non-text-terminal displays.
The display technology assumes a text terminal, just like vim. There are many things you can't do with that which are easy with a proper GUI.