My two cents...

I recently switched to using the emacs edit server in general, and it seems to have gotten quite polished recently. (= Sometime in the last n years since I last played with it...)

I use this trick, so any time I need an emacs I instead get a frame attached to the great mother emacs process, which is transparently spawned on demand if it isn't already running: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient#toc2
(I like getting a text-mode emacs for doing things like typing commit messages, and that works with this too, you just pass -nw to emacsclient.)

When I delete the frame (which I have bound to C-x C-c), then the frame goes away and the emacsclient process returns. (There's still some message about using "C-c #" to dismiss the buffer, but I never do and it works fine.)

I've been running this way for a few months now, and so far it's all been smooth.

This thread reminds me that now that this is working, I should reconsider installing It's all Text! I never did before because the emacs startup overhead was too annoying :-)