Eh, my thought is that 'vi'/'vim -C' should remain conservative but that just 'vim' by itself should turn on the sensible stuff. Certainly 'hidden', if not the more cosmetic searching stuff ;).

Some of the defaults are just plain harmful to people trying to get started. 'nohidden' is awful if you try to use buffers without knowing about it, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who wasn't infuriated by 'backspace' defaulting to "".

I'm not so much a fan of the platform tweaks, since you can't expect each platform to make the same ones. If you learn on one and just assume those settings will be the same everywhere, it can be very annoying when you switch to another system only to discover that your .vimrc isn't getting you the same behavior. 'backspace' is a particularly egregious setting this happens for often I find. It would be better if all systems left backspace="", so that everyone knew to add it to their .vimrc's.