It draws to a VGA style character grid, like it was a DOS/VGA machine from the 80's. Oddly enough, Unix is older than that, and got it right (abstracted from hardware).
> Oddly enough, Unix is older than that, and got it right.
Perhaps it has something to do with Unix tty. Unix systems are mainframes or servers, the tty subsystem only cares about transmitting the text and control sequences, the actual rendering is done by a CRT terminal at a remote location. Meanwhile, the DOS family was designed for microcomputers and PCs, the text output is tightly-coupled with the system and hardware, including how to draw them. The Windows XP console can even switch to the genuine VGA textmode as used by DOS by pressing Control+Enter.
I guess the Unix tty allowed flexibility. It doesn't matter if someone reimplemented it using VGA textmode, or 2D accelerated framebuffer (modern Linux kernel), fancy 3D OpenGL stack (kmscon, but sadly the project is dead), or a cairo-based graphical interface. Meanwhile, Microsoft haven't continue to develop and modernize the console subsystem in a long time (clarify: at least in 8 years of Windows XP era, until recently).
When you stop work for ~20 years, then get crackin' for a few it understandably takes a while for the news to get out. May not be obvious if you're 25.
No, the legacy console is still quite crippled, unicode and tabs just two examples. This new terminal and conpty are promising but have yet to be introduced unless you compile it yourself.
It's a mix of things. Some of them are legacy CP/M / MS-DOS carry-overs, some are strategic decisions. Windows was supposed to be user-friendly and everything would be done through the GUI. This not only de-emphasized CLIs, it was actively hostile to them. I believe that for a time trying to improve CLIs was frowned upon (I haven't worked at Microsoft, it's just based on a million blogs I read from Microsoft employees).
Now that the cloud is the way to go, they're looking at this in a more holistic way, it seems.
It started a while ago, it just took off slowly. Powershell shipped in 2006, for example, and from there all products gradually started integrating with it for admin tasks. Windows Server 2012 already had a command-line-only mode.
We used to have ANSI.SYS, though that was removed long before I started at the company.
We do however have a pretty solid VT100+ implementation nowadays. Case in point, it'd be pretty hard to run anything in the Windows Subsystem for Linux without a complete VT implementation.
