So, I am primarily a .Net developer who does some stuff in Java, Python and a few others from time to time. I have heard a lot of people praise Vim and Emacs for greatly increasing efficiency once the basics are nailed down. I can definitely see how many of the features could be very useful with sufficient practice, and even believe the learning curve is probably worth the effort. However...it seems that you would really have to be some sort of wizard of macros and hotkeys to be as efficient in Vim or Emacs as the average developer is in Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse, or other platforms. I have been starting to learn to use Vim and think some of its features are awesome (column editing for example), but it seems that many of the tools provided by the heavy weight IDEs simply could not be replaced buy even the most juiced up text editor. A few processes I would be skeptical anyone could ever be more efficient at in Vim include (I know VS best, so I will stick to those):generating dbml files for Linq-to-SQLAutomated testingdesigning UIsCreating/organizing projects and solutionsI know Vim and Emacs can do a lot of the same things very powerfully that VS can (like intellisense, refactoring, etc.) and it may be able to do some or all of the examples that I provided, but is it realistic to say that someone working on these platforms would actually benefit from Vim or Emacs? 
Are Vim or Emacs practical for languages like .Net or Java?
ide;vim;emacs
You've got a mix of concepts going on there, which is maybe not surprising since VS combines a lot of rather disparate features together.  One quote (from this site) suggests that Emacs isn't a good IDE, Unix is a good IDE.  The idea being that in the Linux/Unix world, you rely on multiple specialized tools that play well together rather than one monolithic tool that does it all.  Now, I primarily program in C#, and I use VS to do that. I also really love Emacs and use it for basically everything else.  Now, as you say, what you can do in Emacs and what is better to do in Emacs are distinct.  But in many cases it isn't a 1-to-1 mapping and there are different ways to reach the same goals using a text editor and/or other tools.  I originally was going to address each of your points, but the answer always boiled down to yes, you could in some form.  Typically you'd rely on either: 1) an outside tool (like a UI designer) to generate code for you, the import it;  2) automation support from inside the editor (like Elisp code in Emacs) to automate repetitive tasks; or 3) you'd adjust to using text-based tools instead of visual ones (like using MSBuild and writing your own project files instead of relying on VS's set up).In the Emacs world, you don't have a tool that does it all, you have lots of tools and the ability to grow more tools as you need them.  I don't yet know it well enough to do all that, so I use VS and I'm happy with the tools it gives me.  VS is a really powerful, really good IDE.  Now if I was doing Java, I'd have to debate which tool I'd use because I don't know Eclipse or IntelliJ very well.  For any other language, Emacs pretty much wins because it's going to do a lot more for me than any other text editor or half-done IDE that those languages might use. (Except maybe Smalltalk, but that's a unique case.)