Emacs on Mac ?

I had never used Emacs before but took a look at it today on my Mac.
It seems much more like nano or vim as it tends to always use something like Ctrl-X to do something.
Personally, I believe that TextEdit in OS X is much more like Gedit or Kwrite in Linux with a lot less unnecessary complications.
Perhaps it has the benefit (in Linux) that it can be used in single-user (recovery) mode which is often useful when your /etc/X11/xorg.conf is messed up.
For the moment I haven't seen too much in Emacs to excite me but it's good to know what it can or cannot do.