Emacs isn't trying to be special by having it's own keybindings, it's just that it's the same age as Apple the company(1976). Most editors back then were line editors, meaning you would give it a command to change a line, then you would ask it to print the line you just edited so you can see what you did. So yes, it's annoying to new users, but the fact that we have a system that's had 40 years of thought and effort put into it is pretty cool. I'll likely be using it until the end of my career(hopefully many decades from now) or until we stop using keyboards to program these damn machines. I think it's absolutely amazing that a system can survive for that long and have such a long future ahead of it and not because it's parasitic and it's too expensive to get rid of it like most legacy systems, but because it's actually still useful? That's a rare thing.
As for the defaults, vanilla emacs is the worst text editor in existence, building your .emacs file is basically a rite of passage, not sure how to solve that problem, starter packs exist but come with their own problems as you say.
But ultimately it's a matter of trade-offs. You can choose to get up and running quickly with a simpler more modern tool, or you can go deep with emacs and hope it'll pay off. I've found that learning emacs has not only payed off the time investment for me, but the benefit is growing the more I use it. Yes, the first week was horrible, the first month was kind of difficult, the first year clumsy, but the next couple of years have given me an unbelievably powerful tool, and a sense of accomplishment for having mastered it's fundamentals. I recently picked up magit and the way I use git has changed now, I am absolutely better at VC now because of emacs. There is no price for that. All of that vastly outweighs any problem like being clunky in a modern environment, it just takes a while for the benefit to kick in. Will OS X even be around in 40 years? Who knows, emacs just might be tough.