Of course it doesn't work exactly the same way; for example, running a single test doesn't involve highlighting it and telling Emacs to do something magical, but rather flagging it in a way that's specific to the test runner and then doing M-x compile RET RET to point the test runner at that file. The first time I do that, I have to tell Emacs what command I want it to run, but that's no great hardship, since it's buffer-local (each file I'm editing has its own value) and, being a simple test harness invocation, need change only when the filename does. If it matters to me, I can put this information in a configuration file, so I don't have to worry about typing it out even the first time. So far, it hasn't mattered to me. (And, yes, when I run a single test this way, I still get coverage information. Linting happens inline, as linting should, so doesn't really figure into things here.)
The mechanism differs somewhat from what you describe, but the result is the same. Just highlighting the desired test and invoking a keybinding might be a little quicker and more convenient, but so far it hasn't seemed enough so for me to go to the effort of writing Lisp code to do it. It wouldn't be much effort, but since invoking a specific unit test alone takes about a second, it also wouldn't save me much time, which is why I haven't bothered doing it.
A major point of interest here is that none of this workflow is specific to a single language or a single toolset. It works the same way across all the languages I use. Since I work in multiple languages on a daily basis, that's very important to me. It sounds like you work primarily, perhaps exclusively, in Java, so that's not as important to you. The problem is, you seem to have assumed that nobody else's tools can do the same awesome things your tools can do. As I hope you've gleaned from this comment thread, that is rather untrue, and proceeding from the assumption that it is makes you come off as both ignorant and arrogant. What you do with this information is, of course, entirely up to you.
I know most test-runners have the capability to run specific test which suggest that any editor that is capable of executing command-line and bind it to something can support my workflow with some annoyance here and there (as you mentioned, your setup isn't as magical as my description ;)). I mean... someone could've written shell scripts that help them run a bunch of things too...
This is akin of the discussion of using ctags and the need to detect file changes and re-run ctags. Last time I google it there were plenty plugins for each editors and ways to set it up (except there's no clear winner ;)).
The whole idea here is that the IDE helps you not to worry about any of that. IntelliJ supports multiple (mainstream) languages that fulfill my workflow nicely.
Good point that I'm sure Emacs can handle way more languages but the steps to set it up and the limitation (filename change? method name change?) feels more static than dynamic to me.