I find Mac OS X for Unix Geeks very, very helpful. I own the the Tiger paper version, and also the Leopard PDF.
(If you hold an O’Reilly account, and if you register your Leopard paper version of this book by simply entering the right ISBN und My Account, then this month the PDF upgrade costs you only $4.99. Pragmatic Progammers also ask you a question like “what’s the 1st word on page 203”, which you can obviously also answer correctly, if you sit in the coffee corner of your book store with your computer on your lap. But you are an honest book owner, aren’t you?)
Download fink from sourceforge! This opens a wide realm of extra UNIX utility to you. A very nice installer and repository!!
Tell fink to install emacs22-carbon for you! Yes, there is also a carbon native version of emacs. There is also an an emacs23-app (this is a carbon version!!) in the unstable area of the repository, but you don’t want to start your UNIX life on OS X with unstable utilities, as I do, do you?!?
MacPorts is another nice installer and repository, that you may want to get hold on.