My solution on OS X: Run console vim in a full screen iTerm2.
You can multiplex the terminal with screen or tmux, giving you some of the benefits of a tiling window manager. I find it great to have a shell or two next to my editor to track changes, run tests etc. iTerm2 also supports 256 colors and sends mouse events, so you can enable many of the features of the gui-versions of vim.
Agreed. I've never understood why people insist on running vim outside of a terminal. You can use a mouse with macvim in iterm, but if you're using the mouse you're probably not using vim very efficiently anyway.
For me, it is not for the sake of using the mouse. I hate that dreaded device.
Using the GUI, however, spawns a couple of possibilities - being able to use custom fonts and color schemes (with more than 256 or even 16 colors) is something I find important when I sit day after day staring at code. Being able to use plugins that underline (curly) would be another, third obviously to use VIM inside in Vimperator(FF plugin) or Thunderbird.
I'm a *nix guy, I even love Solaris. A couple of years ago, I didn't even have X installed. Everything was in the framebuffer - video, graphical browsing, etc. But I'd never say somebody is a n00b just because he doesn't use the terminal for everything.
You can multiplex the terminal with screen or tmux, giving you some of the benefits of a tiling window manager. I find it great to have a shell or two next to my editor to track changes, run tests etc. iTerm2 also supports 256 colors and sends mouse events, so you can enable many of the features of the gui-versions of vim.