I've been meaning to learn vim for years now. I started a month ago knowing basically how to fudge my way around with arrow keys and save with :w, and that's it. A couple of peepcode screencasts, a bit of daily 5 minute practice on shortcutfoo.com, and a month of pretty disciplined day-to-day coding later and I'm basically back to where I was on TextMate. I'm even using a tmux/vim setup for most of my Android coding, occasionally tabbing back into IntelliJ IDEA if I have to do any heavy refactoring, and even then I have a vim plugin going there.
Is it better? I dunno, hard to say. I like it. I like the tmux-vim combination and it's been a good challenge that's kept my brain engaged.
Now, I have a ton to learn, and that's awesome. But I'm at the point where I'm really comfortable making all of my changes in a vim context, without constant finger stuttering and 3 second pauses like I was doing 3 weeks ago. And it certainly didn't take me 2 years. That's nuts. Maybe 5 years ago before there were so many screencasts, tutorials and practice sites, it may have taken that long. But even then I think any disciplined coder could get up to a moderate proficiency with some daily practice, in a few weeks or months, not years.
This is an old warhorse of a debate that hardly seems worthy of HN, nevertheless here is the conventional wisdom restated: vim vs. idea vs. TM/ST is a question of taste and personal developer happiness, not proven productivity. I know great coders who swear by (EMacs/Vim/IntelliJ/Eclipse/SublimeText) to the exclusion of all others. None of it matters. Was it Knuth who said, "all editor wars lead to madness and early optimization", or something to that effect?