I don't remember what the shell and terminal emulator situation looked like, but I do remember that the installer specifically asks you to choose how you want to partition, so it seems unfair to me to complain about it being the "default".
I put it on my laptop, which I barely use, and just had it still running Win10 until the SSD died. It seems really nice for that purpose, to just get a quick and easy install for a secondary device, while keeping access to everything else I like about Arch.