It's worth also keeping in mind that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with it being an editor for newbies. Emacs can be pretty intimidating to learn straight off.
It's lightweight: my point is there are reasons for using nano beyond "d'oh, I don't know what I'm doing." You don't bring up emacs to edit fstab, or your hosts file. As a result, it's popular among newbies. But that doesn't mean it's without merit, as is all too often implied.
With emacsclient you can easily open those files, quickly, in Emacs; in fact, I would argue you should. fstab has its own editing mode in Emacs with syntax highlighting and so does hosts.
