Not to mention that (IIRC) Spacemacs involves installing evil-mode, which makes Emacs interactions similar to Vim interactions.

Taking that into account, this can be interpreted as "It makes Vim work more like Vim."

The main difference is that in Spacemacs, you hit the space bar and you get suggestions of commands to use, then you can narrow those down by navigating those groups. For example, if you want search your project for a file, you would hit the space bar then type "p" (for project). At that point a number of choices appears, e.g. "f" (IIRC) is to find files in your project.

After a while it becomes sort of second nature:

SPC f s - file save

SPC m t f - mode test file (e.g. if you're in a go file it'd know how to run tests for go files).

Another nice thing is that `SPC ?` brings up a prompt that lets you search for commands: you type a keyword for example and you get all the editor commands that match your keyword, so it's easy to navigate your editor shortcuts. That was useful for me, since every result came with the "spacemacs" shortcut, and the Emacs shortcut, so I ended up learning Emacs for free (I was coming from Vim).

Note: I've also tried Spacevim and the only thing it has in common with Spacemacs is the mnemonic key bindings. It doesn't seem to be discoverable (at least not with SPC ?) and it also doesn't seem to be consistent (I couldn't "guess" what certain things were, in spacemacs it's consistent enough that you can guess). Those are the main core pillars imho: http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html#core-pillars

That's actually a funny coincidence. I've got <Esc> remapped to my spacebar in vim, so the <Spc> f s is a lot like <Spc> w that I use.

Or it could be interpreted as "Make Vim use Emacs keys!"

I was hoping to get all the same key commands from spacemacs in vim. This would be useful for me but it was anything but that.

In the long run that's not likely, because vim isn't nearly as extensible as emacs is; thus it's unlikely that the long tail of emacs functionality exposed by spacemacs will be duplicated in vim and those exposable by spacevim.

If you want an extensible editor, use emacs. If you want a vi-like extensible editor, use spacemacs (or just evil-mode on its own). If you want a lean editor, use vim. Torturing vim (and writing tortured code to torture vim) into a simulacrum of emacs just doesn't make sense to me.