Everybody who uses emacs and tex also needs auctex (previously powertools)! Please add auctex to the distribution.
I am not familiar with this, but perhaps Tim can shed some light on the situation. Tim, do you agree that it is more or less essential?
I hadn't heard of it before today. :-/ When I edit TeX (extremely rarely nowadays), normal tex-mode has worked fine. From a quick glance, AucTeX does seem to be quite a lot more advanced though.
Many people use it here. I don't use it myself since I don't use emacs.
Deferring this to a later release.