In practice I find Terminal/tmux/emacs a more pleasant experience to me than GUI emacs/frame and window/shell.
GUI emacs does brings nice features:
-multiple fonts / font sizes at the same time (nice for minimap http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap !)
-more shortcut possibilities with s- added to the usual C- and M--
-more colours
Shell/ansi-term modes don't work well enough. There's always problems with shortcuts/encoding/escape sequences/Ncurse.
Where did you find a GUI Emacs that doesn't have colors? I use http://emacsforosx.com. To set a color theme: M-x customize-themes.
You might want/need to install more themes, you can do that with the package manager (M-x package-list-packages)
If you want your ~/.profile to be sourced, a quick fix is to open the GUI app from the command line. Apps launched by finder don't source your profile.
my emacs does have colors. It's M-x shell that doesn't have colors.
And this goes to the point of why emacs users like myself use iTerm. Because it works. The only thing I had to setup in iTerm was my color scheme. And even that wasn't required! (iTerm is launched by finder and finds my profile just fine.)
