Jeff Ebert: The emacs package comes with byte-compiled versions of the standard elisp modules, so you don't need emacs-el unless you plan to modified these standard modules.
Or, unless you (or someone on your system, if it's multi-user) wants to read the code to see what's going on. There's lots of documentation, lots of detail on configuration parameters, and a variety of other good things in the .el files. -- Raul
