The most important benefit for me is the "Hot key" feature. I used to have Kuake back in my Linux days, and loved it. It's so much more convenient that having many different screens, and switching between them via "Cmd-Tab". It's gotten to the point where I very rarely open dedicated windows, unless I'm doing some serious debugging or so.

For those who don't know about the hot key; I press "Ctrl-~" to have a terminal screen dropdown from the top of the screen. You can have any number of tabs and splits there. Pressing the same combination again closes it.

The neat thing is I know I can access the terminal with the same single keystroke, no matter which app I am using. Does Terminal.app has this feature?