Why is multitasking considered an admirable talent? We could just as easily think of it as a neurotic inability to concentrate for more than three seconds.
On the length issue: Honestly, Steve's posts were quite long (much like Paul Graham's). To me, it doesn't matter, because every one of them was worth reading all the way through.
To me, it matters very much: I read Yegge because he dared to be verbose. Good, long reading is increasingly hard to come by in the Twitter age.
And I think he had it fairly right with his "impact theory".[1] Most blogging today reads like the textual equivalent of TV infomercials: loud, terse, entertainment-focused, and utterly void of any memorable content, because the author is terrified of "boring the reader". The retention value is virtually nil.
Of all the Internet writing I've read, only a handful is memorable: Bjørn Stærk's old blog (before he got brief),[2] Paul Graham's essays,[3] Erik Naggum's Usenet postings[4] and Steve Yegge's actual rants (like this one).[5] They were all long-winded, and confidently so, because they made a basic assumption about the reader: that of reading for enlightenment, not merely entertainment.
Steve Yegge, if you are reading this: don't do what the others do. Memorable Internet writing is rare. Memorable Internet writing is very rare indeed.
On the topic of Vim: I can imagine an Emacs user going back to TextMate because they're both modeless editors. But would a Vim user go back to an editor that isn't modal?