I think that is what he said, but about the hard part with vi as opposed to my comment about why emacs would be easier: "...vi’s compound command structure and the awkward access to data in BSD queues..." in other words vi's commands are printing characters, and you have to consume a few before you know what to do, rather than direct, modeless execution, which is painful due to lookahead issues in the input buffer. Then the rest are examples. At least that's how it reads to me.
