Osx terminal uses almost all of the emacs movement keys by default. Ctrl-a and ctrl-e are useful but I find the meta movement keys to be the most helpful. (usually alt or ESC)
Meta-f jump forward a word
Meta-b jump backwards a word
Meta-f jump forward a word
Meta-b jump backwards a word
The shortcuts also work in every text field in the OS.
Terminal.app passes the key sequences to the application running inside of the terminal. The default shell (bash) uses GNU readline, which has an emacs-mode and a vi-mode (emacs is the default).
Terminal.app does not use any Cocoa text fields, so has nothing to do with the Emacs keybindings inherited from NeXTSTEP.
It's up to the process running in Terminal.app to support the key sequences sent to it. I doubt that M-f would work if your shell (bash, zsh, etc) were in Vi-mode rather than the default of Emacs-mode.