Well no one is suggesting that you'd input characters any other way, and acme supports sam's structural regular expression command language for keyboard-based editing; so acme supports the keyboard features you're looking for and also has, as you've admitted, better navigation, via the mouse. I suggest you give acme (and/or sam) another try without the prevailing pro-keyboard bias of those people commenting on HN.
Doing a lot of switching between keyboard and mouse will slow you down, IMHO. But that's just me. You're free to have your opinion.
But as I've asked elsewhere, does acme have the ability to send text to an external repl on systems other than plan9 (a continuously running one, not a freshly-spawned one), preferably one running in another terminal window? Does it have indentation for Lisp? does it have syntax highlighting (not necessary, but handy)? does it have colorscheme customization (you'd be surprised how many programs generate illegible text in white-on-black terminals, and I've become quite fond of Solarized)? Can it look up documentation for the functions I'm using (very handy at times)?
I've got the tools I'm used to, and they provide things that Acme never will for me. Maybe I'm not experiencing ultimate Unix Philosophy Zen. Maybe using the mouse is a bit more efficient. But at the end of the day, I'm here to edit text, and Emacs works in my environment, and has some pretty good tools for that.
But my opinion regarding the mouse being faster is supported by research; the opinion that the keyboard is faster or that context switching slows you down is factually incorrect.
Okay. First off, I can use the mouse with Emacs in most contexts. Second off, the time I'm wasting may well be more than the time I'm gaining from all the features I use that Acme doesn't have. Finally, I use my editor over SSH a lot, so Acme is a non-option for me, even if it is so unbelievably brilliant (it isn't).