"Ubuntu's screen-profiles also offer a simpler set of default keyboard shortcuts for screen management that are intended to be easier to use and less likely to conflict with other programs and the user's graphical terminal program. "

Interesting - this would be a downgrade for me. For a while I used "escape ``" but have for years used the default of Ctrl+A. This is a pain for most users because they use emacs mode for the console and find that it gets in the way of their return-to-start-of-line shortcut. Whereas I did some time on ksh88 a few years back and now prefer vi mode for the prompt.

Last week I went to a customer site and for the first time met someone

Any theories on why vi is such a popular editor yet so trivial for console? I've been fluent in -o vi and -o emacs and genuinely think that -o vi is a better option, but know about the significant learning curve from my own memories.

I'd like to see tighter application integration with screen - being able to spawn windows, etc. It would also be nice to have a single hotkey combination that exactly emulates alt+tab under Windows.