Dolphin is the best. I love how it integrates a terminal that follows you through folders. Best of both worlds: GUI and CLI together
Windowing should be a window manager concern. There is no reason for Dolphin to embed a terminal instead of your window manager to just keep a borderless Konsole next to it, like you might see on any tiled WM. It's pure bloat caused by inflexible software.
Personally I would love to see tabs, panes and all that crap disappear from any application. It shouldn't be their concerns to manage windows. My dream desktop would even have Emacs windows be separate frames managed by the window manager, not by Emacs itself.
That seems pretty specific and outside the purview of what a window manager should be doing itself.
Would be really cool, though.
A potentially easier idea I have ruminated on is just letting apps (or better, having the OS almost force them to) expose a "current app environment state" that any other (authorized) app could read and subscribe to (in some waves hands efficient way).
Even in this example, though, you already have security concerns: do I want other apps to be able to know that my file browser is perusing the "pr0n" directory? If no, then how do we put the user in charge of that kind of thing in a way that is simple enough not to make the entire idea more trouble than it's worth?
Purity is not everything. Usability is.
KDE is architectured such that components can be embedded everywhere (kparts), it's one of its strength and it's also sound. Its own kind or purity.
Also Qt is really good at tabs and pane, I'm happy my WM doesn't concern itself with the content of my windows.
Again, and this time less sarcastically, if embedding is the goal, why can't I embed an email client and only the terminal is an approved extension? Seems awfully limiting.
Embedding a terminal in a file manager solves a particular problem. It synchronizes the working directory of the terminal with the directory open in the file explorer. This is a pretty common problem to have, and there certainly are other solutions to it, but embedding a terminal within the explorer is a good solution for a lot of use cases. It's convenient, and it makes sense for a program that manages your files to enable you to more directly manage files with a terminal prompt.
It doesn't really make sense for a file manager to embed an email client because email doesn't usually involve file management. Needing to send an email from a particular directory isn't a problem that anybody has.
Could you synchronize a terminal window and a file explorer window? I'm sure you could with a bit of effort. You could also set up a whole tile manager and dock those two windows together.
For people who don't want to do all that, or don't use or don't like tiling, or who just want to run chmod +x on the file they downloaded, putting a terminal in the file manager is a perfectly valid solution to a relatively minor inconvenience. It even has a hotkey to close it when you don't want your window spoiled by a horrible subframe.
Just because it failed and nobody has so far ever succeeded in delivering on that concept in a usable form doesn’t me we should just give up and go back to living in caves.
It also doesn’t mean that developers who deliver on that only in limited-but-useful ways should be dismissed because they also failed to deliver the comprehensive universal successful implementation of it.
But it makes sense to embed terminal, since you often/sometimes want to run some command in that directory/folder. I never had a need to run mail in specific folder.