On a more serious note, do please feel free to give any and all helpful advice on how to get started with emacs. I'm okay with vim, I've been using it more and less for about 2 years, but emacs has always seemed more esoteric and I never did quite get the hang of it.
Get a friend that uses it well and will be nearby (physically) for a few months. I didn't learn until I spent a summer with Slava (coffeemug) at my side willing to answer questions.
Find ways to do as much as you can of what you normally do with your computer in emacs. If you use IRC a lot, use erc. If you use email a lot, try out gnus or rmail. Don't try to replace your web browser with w3m, that's just stupid and you'll hate it.
Also, find a mode you really like. This will keep you using emacs whether you like it or not, until you really do like it. For me, it was gdb-mode. For most, it's one of the inferior repl modes (slime for lisp or clojure or whatever, ruby, python).
Thanks for the very helpful answer, it's just what I wanted. :)
I do use IRC a lot, and I'll start using erc per your suggestion. One question, is there any way to get spell-checking on it? I'm hoping the solution is as straight-forward as x-chat's (this screenshot demonstrates it fairly well: http://i42.tinypic.com/rw2ljr.jpg though, I don't require fancy multi-language spell-checking, just an English spell-checker will do for me)
I wish I had a friend who used emacs! On that note -- anyone in this HN crowd who uses emacs from Milwaukee? I'm willing to gift copious amounts of chocolate (or whatever else you prefer) in exchange for even short periods of guidance. :)
Get like 2 or 3 different cheat sheets and keep them available whenever using Emacs. Steal someone else's ~/.emacs[1]. Make sure you use those Emacs key bindings in your shell. Bonus points if you're on OS X, which has Emacs bindings for all native text widgets.
This got long, but hopefully there is some good knowledge in here for you.
Steve Yegge wrote some great starter posts on Emacs. He essentially inspired me to get out and learn it. He provides some good starting defaults that you should use. You can Google for these.
If you start Emacs and type C-h t, you'll get the tutorial, which is a helpful starting point. C-h in general is your friend and an entree into several kinds of help, like what keystroke bindings are currently active, what a built-in function does, what a keystroke does, etc.
The Emacs Wiki is a great place to go and just click around for a while. On the front page is a section for the Emacs Newbie. The Nifty Tricks page alone could consume several weeks of learning.
What really sold me on Emacs was M-x shell. I love having a terminal with functionally infinite history, with completions for any text I enter (not just files and programs, read about Hippie expand), where I can munge the output of a shell command in place or just search through it.
M-x shell in combination with server-mode essentially replaced screen for me. server-mode allows you to run Emacs as a long-running server process that you can attach to with emacsclient. So your Emacs process might have uptime measured in months, and you just keep attaching to it from home or at work.
I like ido-mode with fuzzy matching, which functions something like an awesome bar for your editing tabs (or "buffers" in Emacs lingo).
Eventually, you may plateau in your knowledge and you might want to read the manual. It is written in small, digestible bits. You can skip around but it might help to read the first chapters first. It took me about a year to get to the point where it made sense to start eating the elephant.
Last, you might want to investigate Emacs Lisp programming. Writing little programs in the native language of your text editor will make you drunk with power.
