Skewed, but here it is:

My son Duncan uses emacs to program his web pages. He uses an IDE to do BASIC and Smalltalk.

He likes emacs because it can edit anything. He likes the BASIC IDE because everything is laid out for a kid (multimedia, point and drag stuff, etc.). I just had him run through the emacs tutorial and he picked it up fairly quickly.

IDEs will handle the nitty gritty of file creation, directory arrangement, etc. better than an editor. The editors will have a much simpler set of things to learn. Emacs, of course, has it all. ;-)