Toward a "modern" Emacs

The old joke is "Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor". I don't know how fair it is or ever was, but having opened Emacs up a couple times over the past few years, I'm still wondering about the value proposition. I guess the impression is an editor with a newsreader is interesting, but in this days of GUIs and Google making so many things system-independent*, why? Vim gets me what I need when telnetting, and a proper GUI editor like gvim/gedit/atom or a proper IDE gets me what I need when programming, so why would I want to learn emacs? No offense to anyone who likes it, but that's why I've never tried to learn it.

* Yeah, yeah, concerns about the power of Google. At the end of the day, I don't think many people want to ssh into one computer to read their email or newsgroups over a text interface; either they have one system that does it with a GUI, or they use their web browser.