I've found the latest revisions of Emacs to be incredibly ugly, and I have to turn off most of the crap (menus, etc.) to be comfortable. Stock Emacs also seems to want to open up a minibuffer when I've told it "please just edit this set of files". It's also got some idea that I want to to suspend the shell I launched it from (er, no, not ever). The argument I see on forums is: "Well, the right way to use Emacs is to…
At this point, I'd be happy if I could just embed iTerm2 in a buffer and be done with it.