`ansi-term` works well in most cases. The only time it really breaks down for me is when I run commands that combine really long lines and complex escape sequences (like npm's new progress bar which you can thankfully disable).

I'm quite content with shell-mode for most of the things I do (took me a while to get used to some of its quirks, but now I like them). For curses applications (like alsamixer) I use ansi-term.