One more thing: A terminal as a first class citizen. Definitely not on Windows, and while the OSX one is orders of magnitude better, I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking. What ruins OSX for me isn't the terminal, though, it's that X apps aren't first class.
Regarding the Terminal - I never really got what people meant when they said the terminal was lacking. Maybe it's lacking some obscure features, but it absolutely nails the core features. The OSX terminal is, in my opinion, the single best terminal I've ever used (and I split my time fairly equally between OSX and Linux as my main desktop OSes and have tried pretty much every Linux terminal app I can get my hands on).
Unlimited scrollback, the ability to copy and paste using the keyboard, key bindings to clear scrollback, change font size, etc., separate keybindings to scroll the buffer vs. send scrolling commands to the terminal, double-click on parens/etc. selects a range from there to the corresponding other one, and I could probably go on listing more-or-less unmatched _usability_ features for quite a long time. On the other hand, if it's functionality people are referring to then I guess I just don't know what I'm missing because I've never found it lacking in that department either.
Well, the Mac terminal used to suck (especially before Leopard) so maybe people are talking about it pre (Leopard|Snow Leopard|Lion)? All the last three releases greatly improved Terminala.pp so it is in many ways superior to the Linux terminals I have used.
Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals).
Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful and improved at each new release. Tools like brew give you all the package management love you could want, and xorg support is as first class as it could get without OSX being X-based itself.
I guess that if you want to go further than what OSX currently support, then you're looking for getty VTs, tiling window managers or Compiz customizability. As such one should probably not try to shoehorn Linux into OSX and rather use Linux (or some *BSD) directly.
Unfortunately, the terminal on OSX is incredibly buggy. Keeps incorrextly coloring commands, randomly failing... Perhaps it's because of the outdated bash they use?
Ehm, I have been using Terminal.app on OS X for years now, and probably use it > 50% of my time daily (yay for REPLs), and I never really encountered any problem.
The last thing I remember was that in OS X 10.5 I had to change some locale option to have UTF-8 working properly. But that's it.
That's more of a toolkit problem. For most X apps, there's no way to figure out (for OSX) what part of the app is the Main Menu. And what functions to call when a drag/drop happens, there's no interface for it. Under X, every toolkit has it's own solutions. The only solution is to embed support for compiling to native Mac apps into the toolkit.
There were projects to pull that off for KDE and Gnome, but somehow nobody continued working on them. I had the KOffice running first class on my Mac in 2004, and also Inkscape and GIMP a couple of years ago, but these native interfaces were buggy, and somehow there wasn't enough leverage to really finish them. Sad.
Have you tried PowerShell? It provides many more features, and has been a default install since Windows 7. Microsoft has been pushing it by making it possible to use PowerShell to configure a lot of the server products - and sometimes requiring the use of PowerShell for some configuration tasks.
I've tried PowerShell a few times. The thing that puts me off every time is not being able to bind keys. I find it so painful not being able to use emacs shortcuts at the prompt.
Because it operates at the object level rather than the files and strings of nix shells, Windows Powershell is more or less "one ring to rule them all."
I use the terminal heavily on OSX and Linux and I don't see a difference. It sometimes can be perceived as inferior on the Mac because of the lack of package management and issues with dependencies especially when working with Ruby tools. But as far as capabilities go my experience has been that the OSX and Limux terminals are equally equipped.
