Making Emacs popular again

In normal mode, you sometimes want to operate on characters. Commands like replace ('r'), substitute ('s'), delete ('x') work on the character that the cursor is on, unless of course you prefix the command with a number (in which case the command operates across a span of text, but still starting on the character that the cursor is on). It would not make sense for the cursor to be at the beginning of the line, before any characters, because what character are you operating on?

In insert mode, as you say, the cursor acts like in other editors, because insert mode is the mode that is akin to other editors.

Somebody else made a comment about the cursor changing its shape based on the mode---that seems like a very helpful way to understand this difference, what an excellent feature! In insert mode, you can have the pipe-cursor before the first character on the line, because you can start inserting text before the first character. In normal mode, the cursor is an underline, and the action operates on the character that is underlined. The underline cannot move before the first character or after the last, since there's no character for it to operate on.