The emacs macro features compare pretty well. They're a killer feature of emacs. The editor is named after macros, after all.

You can probably accomplish much of what vi's "." does using emacs macros. The trick is that in emacs you have to notice the opportunity slightly in advance, so that you can hit 'C-x (' and then plan out your macro so that it plays back well on subsequent invocations. You could probably train yourself to think of that more often, after which your emacs experience might be roughly similar to that of the vi user.

But I suspect that vi is better designed for such a macro-intensive style of editing. The beauty of "." appears to be that vi workflow naturally divides into little chunks of action, each of which can then be treated post facto as a macro. This explains my #1 pet peeve as a completely ignorant vi user -- that vi is so damned choppy, always switching in and out of insert mode. That's not a bug, it's a feature! Those little transitions are the waypoints that will later be used to break your workstream into repeatable chunks.

Esc-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift ;-)

I started out in Emacs, made the leap to XEmacs, learned to write elisp, then one day I discovered that Vim syntax highlighting was pretty damn good too... it was all over.

Vim + Screen == Real Ultimate Power