I was the one asking the parent question (something about a comparison between Vim and Emacs). I have, since then, spent at least 20 or so hours struggling with Emacs...
And although I wasn't sure at first, I'm pretty sure it's worth it. Though many of the things in Emacs are nowhere near perfect (like the in-buffer terminal, blech!), it feels like something that can go much farther than Vim in terms of I'm-going-to-turn-my-text-editor-into-a-full-fledged-IDE type stuff. I still don't know if I'm going to stay with it, but I've promised to myself that I'll use nothing else to edit text for a month. When that's done, I'll decide, though I suspect by then I won't want to switch.
I didn't like the shell either, until I realized that it's still an editable buffer.
For example, you can take the output of a command, transform the text directly using standard editing commands, fix the weird one-off cases manually, and then pass the results back to the command prompt. Or save the results to a file. Or interleave with code. (etc)
Turning the entire shell into a fully editable/scriptable/keyboard-macro-able scratchpad is a beautiful thing.
The terminal seems most useful to me when copying its output to other buffers. It's not all that special as a terminal program, but it's already inside Emacs, y'know? (I like C-z bound to switch to shell and C-z in the shell to switch back.)
Also, since it's only been mentioned once or twice in this thread: Try re-mapping CapsLock to left control.[1] Ctrl is used quite a bit in Emacs, and often held down while navigating (loosely comparable to toggling modes via Escape in vi). You could also use right-ctrl with the side of your hand when using keys on the left side. People complain about "Emacs Pinky" from bending it down to Ctrl all the time over the years), so if it feels awkward you may want to move Ctrl.
I just wrote this a few days back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230990