Oh, I agree fully. Optimize for the common case. This is why I make a few exceptions like Ctrl-P.
But in this situation, there's one variable missing: the urgency with which off system editing happens. If a machine is blow'd up and stuck in single-user mode, and the only way to get it back is a heroic vi session, or if somebody screwed up an apache config and your site is bouncing customers, or whatever, those are the times you don't need the added frustration of an unfamiliar editor.
That, and I didn't find stock vim to be uncomfortable once I learned it, so I don't feel like I'm sacrificing much to get the luxury of my editor working pretty much the same everywhere in the universe.
In my experience, as long as I don't customize the regular keymappings, switching to a vanilla vim is annoying, but not crippling. About a minute of "dammit I can't use bufexplorer or :Ack" and I'm on my way. A large number of my vim keymaps are programming language specific, so this reduces the level of annoyance even further, as I won't be editing a lot of code on a "burning" server, mostly config files. Any code that is changed, will be a bit annoying, but the changes are usually not big enough that it requires a ton of fancy editor-fu anyway.
The biggest thing I have found with all of this tho, is that everyone has different prefs, so if you're pretty happy with the way it's working, don't change because some folks on the internet are suggesting it, but if sounds interesting, give it a try, the worst that happens is you have to revert to the old way. (different optimization problem here I guess :) )
Not many plugins make it an unfamiliar editor. Actually, reconfigurations of core vim are more likely to cause that kind of frustration (e.g. if you change vim to use Ctrl-V for paste instead of blockwise visual mode). This is so easy to fix.
Getting your dotfiles in git once didn't seem necessary to me - and indeed you can get by just fine - but god it is nice not to have to redo any configs and have my setup always ratcheting forward because I don't keep losing things or not having them.
But in this situation, there's one variable missing: the urgency with which off system editing happens. If a machine is blow'd up and stuck in single-user mode, and the only way to get it back is a heroic vi session, or if somebody screwed up an apache config and your site is bouncing customers, or whatever, those are the times you don't need the added frustration of an unfamiliar editor.
That, and I didn't find stock vim to be uncomfortable once I learned it, so I don't feel like I'm sacrificing much to get the luxury of my editor working pretty much the same everywhere in the universe.