For what it's worth, at least in Mountain Lion you can change the ANSI palette in Terminal.app. That said, it would never have occurred to me that this is something someone might want to do :).
Compare that disgusting color palette with a sane one: https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist
http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/21/add-color-to-the-terminal-in-...
Perhaps I'll give this a go for a while.
This certainly hasn't been true since at least 10.7, and I think for longer than that.
Looks to me like it just exposes many of the out-of-the-box Linux terminal features that aren't immediately obvious & require Googling to setup. But saying that it is so amazing it alone warrants ditching Linux and going Mac is a ridiculous statement that certainly wasn't intended to be taken at face value.
I will agree, though, that the Terminal environment on the Macintosh singlehandedly causes me to use the OS X environment instead of windows - and this is after using SecureCRT/Putty for 6-7 years - so it's clearly not a case of "You love what you are used to."
This is quite a strong statement and caught me a little off guard. What particular features does iterm2 offer that make it so stellar? I'm genuinely curious, as I haven't ever felt the burning need for a "better" terminal emulator on OSX (or Linux for that matter).