Your snarky and condescending tone suggests that you perceive some kind of contest between Vim and Emacs for being a "superior" editor. I guess you have never discovered the fundamental truth - Emacs is not an editor, Emacs is a Lisp REPL with a built-in editor. It cannot be "better" or "worse" than Vim, in the same sense that a Swiss Army knife can't be inferior or superior to a scalpel. Vim is a brilliantly focused tool that does one thing with extraordinary precision and efficiency. Emacs is a programmable universe that, among other things, edits text. You're falling for the classic category error. Those who learn to master both are the truly disillusioned ones, maybe try to be like them, instead of chasing every opportunity to soothe your insecurities. There is a real, pragmatic world where both tools are equally used for true superior experience incomparable to any "alternatives".

And then in vim you can spawn a shell to run ... oh, never mind.

It already has one, plus a native interface to whatever shell you prever (and its own because of course it does)

Emacs had evil-mode (and terminal support) since forever.

In some cases eshell it's far better than sh, altough anything can be better than POSIX sh. Just try rc under 9front (or, as a demo, under GNU/Linux or OpenBSD). GNU tried to create a better interface to Unix with Emacs (and it shows) and 9front just went further throwing down all the legacy crap to the dust bin creating something better. No X, no ioctls, no sh, no Perl, no C++ (golang works, same people in the end).

I think Emacs today with the jitted Elisp interpreter it's able to do far more stuff than depending on external tools such as GNU coreutils, findutils and non-GNU Gnuplot. The 90% of these could be rewritten and even expanded and enhanced under Elisp running pretty fast and interfacing much better with Elisp than any other tool.

Ironically GNU on-current-unixes (and outside of Hurd) it's holding GNU and Emacs back, because a nonroot user can do far more stuff (without group permissions) under Hurd than in GNU/Linux. Think something like namespaces, remote mounting devices a la Rclone (and not just drives) and so on with a boosted Elisp interface and org-mode to manage far more stuff under you account than these restricted Unixen. But a paradigm change is needed.

The 9front users already got it, and the GNU Guix people just began doing that under Guile. Who knows, maybe in 15 years Emacs it's rewritten fully under a uber fast Guile with libre RISC-V microcode based CPU's from Taiwan or Estonia or whatever, loading Guile-optimized code on demand for HPC tasks and the like and some others loading a server-balanced microcode (and OS settings) grom a custom Guix config. That would yield a very different computing than the one we are suffering today. It would be the second Golden Age, similar to PDP10+ITS/WAIS creating the path for the literal 60 years of computing where basically Lisp and Forth invented everything or nearly everything.