You know what? I was ready for bullshit and you actually gave a compelling answer :P Yeah, that's a bummer, but there aren't that many instances of that drawback (it's bitten me a couple times maybe in many years?) and on the other hand text mode gives a lot of convenience like being able to use it from SSH and other niceties.

Anyways, I don't think such behavior is inherent to "the console", only Linux's particular implementation (i.e. it's tty's fault) which admittedly is pretty outdated and relies a bit too much on control characters.

IMHO the original question still stands:

> What would a GUI bring to this that isn't possible in the console?

In my experience text mode brings a lot that GUIs don't, and not the other way around.

Plus it's easier to make a GUI wrapper for a console program than a console wrapper for a GUI program.