^p, and ^n are nice for navigating lists, but it ^ isn't a comfortable way to navigate on a frequent basis. It would be nice to have a keyboard navigation mode in TM that didn't require a meta key.

I sincerely think you are better off finding ways to emulate the features of TextMate you like in MacVim than you are waiting for the ability to emulate the features of MacVim you like to appear in TextMate. Modal operation would almost certainly have to be a post-2.0 feature, and... well.

For my own Vim use, I use the Project plugin (which I'm not entirely happy with, but I don't like the other alternatives any better), PeepCode's "PeepOpen" to emulate TM's quick file switching, FuzzyFinder to bring comparable switching between buffers, SnipMate for snippets explicitly modeled after TM, and TagList for the equivalent of a function navigation popup.