I'm not a fan of 80(or 72) characters pr. line followed by a line-break even if your VIM inserts the line-break itself - you'll easily run into inconsistency problems when editing that line of text afterwards. Otherwise I have nothing against the editor, but somehow editing text as I do in a GUI editor makes me sleep better at night.
So, I discovered that the reason for the line breaks was primarily due to inability to move through softly wrapped lines, and hence I found this article: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Move_through_wrapped_lines which works, but I'm looking for a solution that would work in insert-mode as well as edit-mode.
P.S. I'm probably a newbie at VIM :)