Vim is great, but hard out of box. That's why I'd like to mention couple community distributions to make it even better:
• http://vim.spf13.com this distribution is remarkable! Extremely well documented vimrc file is a great source of knowlege by itself https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim/blob/3.0/.vimrc
• https://github.com/carlhuda/janus
Also, it worth to mention
and
I would recommend against starting with someone else's pimped out configs and go with something more conservative. Tim Pope's sensible.vim is a good starting point. It has "sensible defaults" but no opinionated keyboard configs, extra plugins or so.
https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible
That's pretty much all I have, plus a few personal shortcut keys and some syntax highlights that aren't included in vanilla vim.
It's pretty short, I recommend copying it to your .vimrc, understanding every line (:help) and modifying to taste.