My problem was mucking around with regular emacs stuff whenever I was trying to get into evil-mode or out of emacs. 17 years of vim muscle-memory trips me up every time I try to recall the magic combination of keys that does what I want. I never made it far enough to use emacs to modify my emacs configuration and enable evil-mode by default. Spacemacs seems to make this a lot easier by setting up evil-mode for you. It also replaces all of the control-this and meta-that with hitting the spacebar in while you're in command mode.