What I've been thinking is, why can't we have both? Imagine just two changes: a workspace's mode can be switched between tiling and floating, and additional workspaces are just windows. Now you can have any combination of floating and tiling that makes sense to you. You could, for instance, set your desktop to tiling mode and open two new workspace windows, the switch one to floating and run your GUI desktop stuff on the left side of the screen and several terminal tiles on the right.