For first-time users, Vim is daunting. Not to say ugly.
Here’s how MacVim looks out of the box:

Even monster hacker Yehuda Katz had a hard time with it.

But it need not be that daunting. Just install janus (Carlhuda’s vim plugins distribution), and everything will look almost like they did in Textmate:

Here’s the one-step install command:
curl https://raw.github.com/carlhuda/janus/master/bootstrap.sh -o - | sh


Have fun!