Does this mean that nowadays you can expect emacs to be installed on every system? From what I've seen, still no. So basic vi skills are still needed. But nowadays, there are many ways to avoid having to edit files with vi. If a system has sftp access you can mount it's file system via sshfs and edit files from your main machine in emacs. This way you could even have the files version controlled on your main machine. There's also tramp mode of course, but sshfs works better.
When you really need vi, you really need it. I'm talking about connecting to servers halfway around the world with the only access being via a serial connection. Straight-up serial console, none of this fancy newfangled terminal emulator nonsense. No amount of emacs and sshfs will help you then.
