My windows machine can run make and gcc natively. You don't need to be unix to run those platforms. I haven't watched fuchsia closely (last interfaced about 6 years ago, talked to a team member, who said that eventually it would be able to emulate unix enough to build and host a compiler).
I guess I should have put my question in a more useful way: why would I want to use this desktop, given its limitations compared to existing desktops? Is it ever going to be a development system? If not, I can't see how it would grow beyond being a device environment- in which case there probably shouldn't be a terminal anyway. Probably I'm asking for something which is not a goal of fuchsia, but in that case, I really can't get exicted about something that's supposed to replace Android and other OSes.
