If you're on OSX and want a good Emacs, go to https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port and read the installation instructions under the Homebrew section. It follows the official Emacs repo pretty closely, but has useful OSX additions (smooth scrolling, gesture support [font size e.g] and more).
I'm on OS X, but I just installed GNU Emacs from source and run it in a terminal window. Never really understood GUI versions of Emacs -- they seem to defeat the purpose of Emacs.
Oddly, I find the opposite to be true, although I can't really think of a good way to justify why.
I have a GUI emacs-server running that I can open buffers from via emacsclient for "serious editing", but I often end up using vim for quick edits rather than bother with emacs[client] and context-switching.
I imagine it might be different if I could get used to running my shells from inside emacs with eshell or ansi-term, but have never had any success getting them to work right and be usable.
Actually, one reason for preferring the GUI does stand out - quite a bit more freedom in key-bindings, especiallly with ns-cmd-modifier and friends, and some C- bindings that are otherwise impractical in console mode (at least to my knowledge)
Since around 1999, my development workflow has been an IRC client, Emacs and various shells running inside a screen session. So it's not really context-switching for me -- Emacs is always live and running in there, so when I need to write or edit something, I just use it.