What's really useful about the inbuilt terminal is that it's hooked up to the job control bits, which lets you do things like feed chunks of text to whatever happens to be running in it. I've got this set up as an operator[0] (fair warning, it's been a while since I've tested this much, and there are a few things it could probably do better), which is handy for, as an example, running python/irb/whatever in the terminal and sending function definitions to it as you write them.
EDIT: For the sake of being equal-opportunity, you can do the same thing in emacs with make-comint, even down to having it as an operator if you're using evil-mode. Y'know, whatever you're into.
EDIT: For the sake of being equal-opportunity, you can do the same thing in emacs with make-comint, even down to having it as an operator if you're using evil-mode. Y'know, whatever you're into.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/Wibjarm/5ae4c4da57bd034d15123cd8edad...