The Exigent Duality
Not analogous - 11:28 CST, 1/23/17 (Sniper)
Arguing about the superiority of Emacs or Vim is like debating which is better: the hammer, or the screwdriver.

Emacs is a general purpose text editor. It renders in its own, framed window. It has unbelievable extensibility, so it's equally good for full-time note taking and programming. It's an on-steroids replacement for Notepad or Leafpad.

Vim is a terminal editor. When SSH hopping between servers, Vim is the perfect tool for rapidly editing remote configuration files, or even making quick code tweaks.

I have been using both on a daily basis for at least fifteen years. To me, there is little to no overlap in their respective use cases-- they are both indispensable, but for different reasons.

Of course, even modern-day Emacs can be run in a terminal, and there are forks of Vim which run it in a framed window. But as packaged and utilized in any popular GNU/Linux distribution, my commentary above holds true.