Long ago I complained about cmd.exe. At the time, I tried out some of the replacements and didn't find anything I liked. But, I just tried out a Console 2.0 beta, and I love it! The way it hosts cmd.exe is necessarily a bit of a hack, but they pull it off well. Here are some of the features I love:

• A regular selection model - no stupid rectangular selection!
• You can drag a file into Console and it puts the full path in. You can't drag text out, but that's not a huge deal.
• It's a regular application with a menu bar and a regular window.
• Copy/paste work as expected. You can also map them to any keys you want. I'm still not sure which keys to use. One nice thing on the Mac is that it has a command key used for commands so you don't have to worry about conflicting with control-C.
• Having tabs is nice. You can configure the New Tab submenu with new command defautls. This is really handy.
• You can remap colors which is a little better than just changing the defaults for the background and text. I tried getting black text on a white background working, but I was seeing some strange behavior and couldn't get the cursor to work properly.
• It lets you choose any font without hacks (I like using Consolas).

Overall, it's a huge improvement.