> What kind of person says "this is a job for nano, while this is a job for emacs?"
Me, I use nano for quick edits over SSH and a different editor/IDE for everything else (which is done locally and pushed, I (incredibly) rarely edit anything on the server.
> What kind of person says "this is a job for nano, while this is a job for emacs?"
Depends on what you're used to. Even I as a seasoned die-hard Emacs user who is aware of both TRAMP and emacsclient will still fire up VIM (or vi) for various reasons: because it's what I grew up on, because I can't remember how to use TRAMP to edit that file remotely or as root, or the system is really not up to the task of running emacs.
I have a very specific example of jobs for nano vs vim. When I need to copy paste some code into a server and I don't have clipboard access over ssh, nano is better for that than vim, because vim tends to keep tabs indented, so I'll use nano to paste the file into, and then go into vim to edit it. I'm sure there are other examples.
You run emacs / vim / sublime / atom exactly because it's much more than a simple text editor, it's a development environment of sorts.