Yes, I just use "emacs -nw -q" (aliased as eq) when in terminals, and it's surprisingly good most of the time. But having good startup time always would make a huge difference imho, including Emacs's popularity.
Parent is talking about using "emacsclient". Basically you start Emacs in daemon mode (e.g. add "(server-start)" at end of config), and you never kill it. You just pay slow startup cost once, any subsequent client invocation after that is instantaneous.
