The iPhone analogue of Vim-like editing?

What'd b the iPhone/touchscreen analogue of Vim-like editing?  

The most obvious thing would b to have modes.

This might not seem that useful. After all a lot of the benefit of having modes is being able to explicitly specify positions in the text or blocks of text, such as 'the end of this sentence' or 'this paragraph', whih is less of a benefit with a touchscreen coz u can directly point at and select things.  

Still I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to b easier to specify certain text positions/ranges in a vim-like way.

Another benefit of modal editing is dealing with structure such as markup or code.  

Coz the iPhone has a virtual keyboard it could have different virtual keyboards for each mode. At least it'd be interesting to see if this made things better.
   
You could poss also use gestures (or maybe even phone movements) to specify certain commands. 

And I wonder if such an editor could help w/ coding on phone ala Y-Combinator's RFS 5: Development on Handhelds.