Not quite. What I envision is something that has a broader colour palette, say 256 colours. Themeable. Perhaps like subpixels, there’s some kind of sub-character addressing mode to give more control aesthetics but not too much. And for contiguous blocks some basic capability to support proportional width text. Same with ability to fill blocks with images.
I may have already gone too far with the proportional text.
Yeah, there's something about character-cell displays that makes knocking out a UI prototype really easy, because everything naturally aligns itself to the grid.
It's a bit depressing to watch the HTML/CSS users go through huge contortions to set up a reliable cross-browser typographic grid (i.e. a consistent line-height) and equally-spaced 12 column layout. On the VT100 you get all of that for free. :)
I don't think I've ever seen anyone explore the concept of mixing proportional fonts with the standard 80-column monospaced character-cell display. One problem to solve is how to inform the program driving the terminal about the font metrics (i.e. width of each character) -- this already rears its head when showing UTF-8 text on a terminal thanks to CJK full-width characters, but in that case the width is always exactly 1.0 (half-width) or 2.0 (full-width) and isn't a property of the terminal's current font.
I may have already gone too far with the proportional text.