Nah, vim's modal. True, one of those modes is 'break everything', but the other mode is 'beeping furiously', so I generally notice I'm not in emacs pretty quickly.
Beeping is a feature. The user must be made aware that they are typing in vim, lest they start pressing random key combinations, like C-x, C-m etc.
It is well known that users may press these keys by mistake, while falling asleep on their keyboard. Therefore, vim beeps to keep them awake and avoid trouble.
