After years of using PenguiNet to SSH into my home server, and from there everywhere else, I've migrated most of my terminal use over to Terminator — which is about 700 lines of Python (plus, er, about half of Gnome). I still use PenguiNet, but it's mostly just a SSH tunnel for Terminator's X window.
My primary motivation? Fixed 6x13, in Unicode. PenguiNet can do one or the other, but not both, because the Windows .fon/.fnt formats can only handle up to 255 glyphs and nobody's managed to make a vector version of it that actually works properly. Oh, and every TTF/FT console font I've ever seen sucks donkey balls.
I don't really *need* Unicode, of course, good old iso-8859-1 suits most of my needs just fine, but there is something to be said for being able to copy something off a website using curly quotes and em-dashes, and having them actually paste properly elsewhere. Also, now I can actually see all that Russian and Chinese text spammers keep sending me. I feel almost worldly.
Also, for the most part, I find I prefer the tiling approach to PenguiNet's MDI; I often do open way more terms than I can actually display at once, but this often turns out to be a mistake, since I'm constantly losing the bloody things. I do look forward to being able to put groups of terms into tabs, though; there's already a branch (or two) for that, in fact.
A FreeBSD port is in the PR queue, and Ubuntu users can grab it out of Universe.