Hah. I think some of you actually do believe the 'we' part of this.
There is a good argument for notepad, but then there's a good argument for dreamweaver too, as the notepad weenies tend not to go much further than a few tables.
They do tend to think they're super-l33t though. Funny.
Personally, I think it's mostly about preference. Kind of a Ford/Chevy arguement, for the most part.
And it has a lot to do with the application of what you're doing. It would be overkill to set up an OpenBSD box and learn to use vi if you're just going to serve basic, static HTML pages. Just like it would be silly to try to run a database with millions of records, and handle hundreds of simultaneous connections using WinXP.
vi is nice if you routinely edit files that contain thousands of lines of code. If you don't, why spend the time learning it? I like some of the features like global search and replace, etc. It can be a real time saver.
I assume HTML editors have come a long way since I messed around with Netscape Composer. It was just real frustrating to me, because nothing would lay out like I wanted, and the images would jump to the wrong side of the page, and things like that. Then, when I tried to edit the code that it generated, it was just a jumbled mess, and I had to start over from scratch.