In practice I find Terminal/tmux/emacs a more pleasant experience to me than GUI emacs/frame and window/shell.

GUI emacs does brings nice features: -multiple fonts / font sizes at the same time (nice for minimap http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap !) -more shortcut possibilities with s- added to the usual C- and M-- -more colours

Shell/ansi-term modes don't work well enough. There's always problems with shortcuts/encoding/escape sequences/Ncurse.