Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) recently gave a talk to the FOSS @ Oxford event on the power of Emacs and why he uses it. The video for the talk is not yet available but he does have the transcript that he used for delivering the presentation.
It was a nice talk that explained why Prot believes Emacs is a tool that everyone using a computer should be familiar with and make use of. The TL;DR is that Emacs is extensible and can integrate all the (text-based) tasks you need to perform on your computer. If, as a trivial example, you develop a color and font style that is pleasing to you, you need only implement it once: Emacs will use it for whatever tasks you like. Non trivially, you can arrange for various tasks to communicate with each other and share information if they need to.
Prot stresses a point that Irreal has often made: You don’t have to be a programmer to make good use of Emacs. Writers, teachers, liberal arts academics, and many others can and do leverage Emacs to make their work easier. Of course, if you know a bit of Elisp it’s even better because you can extend Emacs to do whatever you need. Prot himself is not a programmer but he taught himself Elisp and is now a significant contributor to Emacs.
The takeaway from Prot’s talk is that Emacs is all about freedom. Freedom to make whatever changes you like, freedom to explore the source code and see how Emacs does things, and freedom to share with others and learn from them.
Take a look at the transcript or wait for the video if you prefer visual presentations. In either case, it’s well worth your time.