At least in current Nightly, you can hit the Esc. key, to pop up the console regardless of the panel you're currently using (à la Chromium, basically). I'm not sure in which release this landed, though.

For the vertical split thing, opening a bug is the easiest way to get the feature in [1].

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c... (this is a URL with the right bugzilla component. just log in, fill the blanks and submit)