> Yep, pressing Ctrl-S in a terminal and having it freeze up is extremely confusing at the best of times.

At least some terminals (IIRC, KDE's Konsole is one of them) show a helpful colored bar telling you that the output is paused and you should press Ctrl-Q to resume. Unfortunately, other popular terminals (like Gnome's gnome-terminal) don't have any visible indication for that.