I suspect curses could be updated to fully support Windows, even without the VT100 mode (all the functionality has existed for years, just through a different interface). It really just needs someone to take on the project, and there are already better options out there (I forget the name, but the IPython team are very happy with whatever library they're using these days), so possibly it's more of an awareness problem that doesn't need to be solved in the core distro.