> I guess you're conflating thin-client terminal in the networking sense vs vt100 hardware terminal lineage

Yes, I didn't really think to separate the two. While my examples of ssh/telnet/rlogin are all of the networking variety, I didn't mean to exclude RS-232 (which the VT100 used). Regardless of whether the wire is for serial or packet data, if you're at a terminal (including any of the thin/dumb/smart varieties), you're not at the box doing the heavy lifting because that's on the other end of a wire representing an important demarcation, a demarcation that doesn't really apply to a local app running a text-mode user interface (or if the mental gymnastics are performed that does introduce such demarcation even within a local app -- think backend vs frontend -- then all local apps are terminals).