I guess the target market for Atom is those that already use a closed editor like textmate or sublime.

As an emacs user, I would be pretty happy if someone came along, took the super extensibility of emacs (which at first glance atom appears to do) and spun up a sexy, modern, not-lisp-using alternative. The thing is though, my number one priority for a text editor is that it's under a Free Software compatible license. This is simply not a negotiable point for me personally.

I honestly find it pretty amusing that despite the fact technology progresses at such a rapid rate, I'm using a text editor that was first developed a decade before I was even born.