Failing to see the allure of Emacs

[Daniel <unagimiyagi@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I started learning emacs 48 hours ago.  The motivation for this was to
be able to do programming and general computing tasks through just
emacs.  I've seen the wizards who are just doing all kinds of crazy
stuff--quickly.  I am not sure what the benefit is now, though, after
going through the tutorial.

Yes, I can edit text files and python files and java files no
problem.  And I have no doubt that I'll get faster. But I thought that
I would never have to leave the emacs terminal window.

So much of daily computing for anyone consists of pdfs, word, excel
documents, gmail, itunes, file browsing, etc.  So I still have to
switch to the gui to do these things.  If I've still got to leave the
emacs environment to do general computing tasks, what is the
productivity gain here?  There are plugins, I know, but I haven't
explored those.

I've always been someone who reads the shortcuts built into something
like BBEdit or TextWrangler, Notepad ++, or Eclipse, so I am not sure
how much more productive I'll be.

Also, I'm a bit confused with regards to using dired to navigate files
vs just the bash shell, which I'm more familiar with.

But again, did I expect too much out of emacs?  So far I find it to be
about as good as BBEdit . It's a text editor but no more.  I expected
emacs to be the one program that ruled them all.
Thanks