After a few months of vim use, I did part of the vim tutorial using both vim and a click-and-type editor (gedit) and timed myself. Gedit was significantly faster. Can't say I understand you vim fanatics.
I don't know how you are working and what your typing characteristics are, but you are probably not doing a lot of fast typing. Once you type reasonably fast (>30wpm), the time you have to invest to reach for the mouse, do some funky things and home back in to the keyboard is quite significant. Another thing is, that once you got some of the very useful commands into your bone, like repeat action, some of the more el…
I do generally use vim for editing over ssh, although since I am root on the machines I work with, I would configure Gedit to work over ssh if I did any serious remote editing.