The nice thing about Emacs is how much it's open to modification. There are compatibility modes to make it work like other editors (eg. "evil mode" to make it work more like Vi, "cua mode" to use "normal" key combos instead of having to learn Emacs's, etc.). There are often a bunch of alternative ways to do things, which have their own pros and cons, so if something seems frustrating, it pays to Google around a little to see if there's another way.
For example, running a terminal can be done with `term` (b/w) or `ansi-term` (colour), which provide a pretty standard xterm-like terminal emulator, completely under the control of whatever shell you use (eg. bash). This is useful for screen-manipulating programs like ncurses-based UIs, but is awkward to manipulate as text (a bit like the awkward copy/paste functionality in screen and tmux).
There's also `shell`, which runs a regular shell (like bash), but Emacs keeps control of the screen. This makes it useless for curses-based UIs, but great for text manipulation. For example, rather than running a pipeline over and over, tweaking the output options, we can often just dump everything to stdout then play around with it using the full power of Emacs (search/replace, regexes, keyboard macros, lisp functions, etc.).
There's also `eshell`, which is like shell mode but instead of a regular shell like bash, it uses a custom shell written in Emacs Lisp. Eshell's strength is its integration with Emacs; for example, Emacs Lisp functions can be run just like commands and Emacs buffers (including shells!) can be treated as files, etc. Eshell's weakness compared to shell is that it can't do pipes.
Personally, I use mixture of shell and eshell, plus some handy Lisp functions eg. for spawning new shells instead of always switching back to the same one. I avoid term and ansi-term in favour of a separate st terminal though, since they're pretty slow to update and their lack of decent text manipulation makes them feel uncomfortably "un-Emacsish".