No, it's not the user catching Linux in trying to pretend user friendliness witht the terminal.
It's Linux catching the user in still hating it when he gets the wanted user friendliness, for the sole reason of being conditioned to hate the terminal.
What? The person you're replying to doesn't have the best argument in the world so I'm not exactly siding with them, but also a lot of terminals very much do support mouse input. I'm not sure which all ones it is, but I know the gnome terminal does and I'm pretty sure Konsole does as well. Obviously not every program you run in the terminal is going to support it but off the top of my head I remember vim does as well as I'm pretty sure dialog
Don't forget loadhigh (lh) and his friend DEVICEHIGH and check with mem the memory layout if anything more can be sqeezed into some unused block lying around...