Vim and emacs usually run in the terminal and require keyboard commands to complete actions.
It is most certainly not usual to run Emacs in the terminal.
although of course it’s possible to use keyboard commands.
And you can use Emacs with a mouse.
I mean, it’s an IBM ThinkPad, it is slow. Linux just makes it usable.
What part is confusing you?
Meanwhile nix install instructions start of with a curl
or has the most packages of any distro
That’s very much open to discussion. You can’t just go by the number of packages because nixpkgs for example has multiple python versions as separate packages, each with a set of the same libraries just with a different prefix.
It is, but you have gui features
I use Emacs and neovim. Each is better in different scenarios.