It's funny that many of the principles like "Auto-save changes", "Restart where you left off", "Make commands accessible everywhere", "Use words instead of icons" are qualities I enjoy on Emacs, and qualities that derived from the Lisp machines also.
The only conflicting point is "Never allow customization", which I guess is where typical user needs diverges from expert user. Everything else seems to be universal of good UIs.
What customizations do you want to make? I made a few macros in FORTH, but that's probably not what you're talking about. Plus, those macros were stored on floppies, not nvram or a hard disk, so you had to remember which macros you put on which disk.
But yeah, you can't change the desktop image on the Cat (cause there is no desktop.) And you can't change window border width (cause there are no windows.) It's a very focused interface.
The only conflicting point is "Never allow customization", which I guess is where typical user needs diverges from expert user. Everything else seems to be universal of good UIs.