Thoughts
I think there's a very real opportunity to replace the terminal emulator, system terminal driver, the line editor (zle or readline or
equivalent), and the shell with a novel text-based input-output system for invoking programs.
If I type `python main.py` today that text gets converted to a format that is compatible with teletype writers before python is executed. And I'm not opposed to backwards compatibility, but Python doesn't know or care that it's being invoked from a terminal at all. It interfaces with standard out/standard in for the most part naively. These terminal escape characters are used primarily to interface between the shell and the terminal emulator.
So if you replace the whole terminal and shell and end up with a command entry system that you completely control, allowing you to do syntax highlighting and auto completion and inline docs and configuration in a terminal-liberated GUI. And then you invoke Python as a subprocess and output the result in, again, a GUI text box that you control with smooth scrolling.
You need a thin compatibility layer to support terminal codes for color, but that's about it. And this could honestly replace most of my terminal use cases.
(Edit Mar 20, for search, SMASH)