I continue to be haunted by something a good artist friend used to say: "Don't obsess over your tools. They are not the goal".
This would ring in the back of my head as I spent many hours configuring my editor / shell / terminal setup. It felt like a guilty pleasure.
It dawned on me however, that what had drawn me to programming in the first place was a sublime text editor (TextMate), and that my business is in fact tool-building. My love for computing tools and the experience of using them reflects in the kind of software I build for clients.
On top of this, evaluating and obsessing over hacker's tools isn't confined to picking between models at the hardware store. I have pored over (and patched, however minor) bash, vim, tmux, rxvt-unicode, and many other programs that I use every day.
These things may well be rationalizations, so here's a simpler justification: the time I invest into my tools have made my experience of sitting down in front of a computer incredibly enjoyable. I once lived computer free for three years because I detested the uninspiring (and frustrating) experience of Microsoft Word and Windows 98. If that was what computing was, I wanted nothing to do with it.