In my opinion, vim's command line usage (while quite nice) isn't the reason why people are so die hard about it. Vim is one of the very few editors out there that provide language based commands, allowing you to chain and build a command in the same way that you'd tell a human how to work. Vim's shortcuts have nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Try implementing something similar in a modern IDE and you'll find that vim's syntax for hotkeys is actually really well designed. That's why you always see vim-modes for modern IDEs - they want the language that it provides, not the command line functionality/ubiquity of vi.
