Throwing up a menu to provide context and ask you what you want to do, rather than assuming a default, is not some thing that only magical GUIs can do. CLIs with menus is not some crazy new thing.
As an example of how manually configuring the editor flag can be annoying, consider a job where you regularly ssh into many machines, each that just by default use vim. I know how to use vim, I just don't like it, but pretty much every single machine I have booted into always assumes I want to use vim, and even if you remember to change the flag doing it to many machines all the time is majorly annoying.
