that's the old-school Starcraft way. try mapping caps-lock to control sometime, just to see, it's such wasted real-estate. nothing beats muscle memory and years of practice though.
Caps-lock as control is a nice but unsymmetrical mapping. If you want to avoid pain you might want to use the opposite hand to hold control while hitting a key combo. At least, this is what works best for me. I never have to twist my hand into unnatural positions.
Yes it's hard to get started, but once you get the hang of it navigation in emacs just becomes so painless.
Also it's hard or even impossible at first to do it on laptops but trust me you will be able to do it.