This is waaay over my head. I can't even figure out what emacs is after a google search. I found the wiki but still am having trouble deciphering what it all means. Thanks for the info, though. It was interesting to look at something new.
Emacs is, according to popular joke, an operating system with text editor function :P. Seriously though, Emacs is an extensible with hundreds (if not thousands) of add-ons programmable text editor. Programmable means that you can automate quite a lot of work from within it. Really good for programmers, not sure if worth to use just for notes. Org-mode is an engine that depending on some instructions from you takes the body of the note and applies the syntactic/formatting rules to print it. What's cool is the fact it's a rather easy syntax that can be exported into a lot of formats (HTML, LaTeX, Markdown, RTF etc).