> It has to be turned on.
"set incsearch" is all it takes to get incremental search. Are you trying to argue that Emacs defaults are so good that you never need to change it? I find it hard to believe you never have any "setq"s in your Emacs config.
> In emacs you can type to search then ctrl+s to move to next match then continue to type to edit the search string
In vim you can type to search then n to move to next match then /<ctrl-p> to continue to edit the search string. But seriously, a fuzzy searcher or :grep would be more useful for that sort of thing.
> Replace has advantages in emacs when it comes to case matching.
Case matching is a thing with Vim's regex too.
> And it goes on and on.
But all of the things mentioned so far are about basic editing capabilities that any decent editor would support one way another.