Emacs documentation is a forest. I came from Emacs to Vim when I realized how organized Vim's documentation is, and how chordable many of the features are. I don't know what lies down the path of an Emacs expert, but I will warn you that learning to do anything useful in it takes a long time, and won't make you any better at nethack. Stick with Vim.
Textmate is a better Emacs for Macs, though that won't help you with Solaris. Eclipse is kind of cool, and has a lot of plugins.
