I always hear this and even emacs people reinforce it. Maybe I'm abnormal but I don't do much configuration. My .emacs loads up a few modes specific to certain programming languages I use, that do syntax highlighting and such. There's maybe one or two global keybindings I can type in from memory if I have to, and otherwise I just use the defaults and it's fine.
These are both good points by you and the parent that I never really realized. If you don't 'like' (for lack of a better word) configuration then Vim is definitely the better editor.
I'm indeed the type of guy that carries his config files with him :) (be it on a USB stick, my website, Dropbox, GitHub, etc.)
It seems like everything the author likes about vim are simply features he found more easily than he did in emacs. Duplicating a line in emacs is not difficult. emacs certainly has macros as well. A few simple google queries or looking in the emacs help system would reveal this very quickly. Not that there is anything wrong with vim, but the criticisms against emacs and other editors just seem lazy.
i use vim and emacs both every day for different purposes. it's my opinion that vim is a better text-editor, but emacs is clearly the more powerful of the two.
in the bitter end for me it comes down to whether or not i can swallow the indentation that emacs wants to shove down my throat for that particular language. for lisp, yes, for javascript, no thanks.
Emacs has modalities too, but you can't bail out of them by hammering on ESC...
I'm sure I could get comfortable in emacs, but then I'd be one of those guys that has to copy his config files everywhere.