What happens when you're remoted into another box? Multiple terminals is fine on local, but when you've SSHed into some remote, screen is your friend for managing multiple parallel sessions of work. (In addition, as you mentiond, to persistent sessions -- if you break off, you can always reattach to any of your sessions)
Its just never really been a problem, ssh'ing into remote boxes has literally no cost (I have auto complete hostnames, and sshkey pairs.)
for processes taking longer than a day normally need something like screen, however thats so rare, most things are run inside another execution environment(jenkins, render manager, grid engine/mesos etc)
The remote server I happen to do most of my work on right now has tmux installed, so I don't even need to bother with screen anymore (at least for now).
