It's great to see improvements in Emacs. Are there any developments on getting a decent terminal emulator? I use term but occasionally have to open GNOME terminal when Emacs' term can't display something properly (like ncurses-based programs).
One of my goals was to unify shell-mode (and related "comint" modes) with a proper terminal emulator, but had a hard time getting traction for this. So people added horrible hacks like color support to shell-mode, instead of improving term-mode. I mentioned this unification goal recently (see bug#22785 "comint/shell modes should be merged with term mode"), but people still don't get it.
These days I'm back to working on terminal emulators, but using Web technologies (DOM, JavaScript, CSS). It's pretty cool, IMNSHO. Please check out DomTerm (http://domterm.org).
The built-in terminal emulator is atrocious, both code-quality and feature-wise.