Mintty isn't an alternative to Cygwin, it's a part of Cygwin: an alternative to the standard windows terminal that Cygwin used to launch by default. Recent Cygwin installers actually set up Mintty by default.
You seem to be confusing terminals (programs that provide a text environment) and shells (usually text-based, often run inside a terminal). Mintty is a terminal. cmd.exe is a shell, but will spawn Windows' own ANSI terminal when asked. Cygwin's bash will also spawn Windows' own terminal when run without one. Fish is a shell, and needs to be run inside a terminal.
Console2 is different again. As I understand it, it wraps Windows' terminal, providing some extra features.
I did something like this in my presentation[1] about Ember.
It uses Ember.js to maintain the state of the code samples and proved to be very stable. I don't have interactive sliders on specific values, but the code is parsed and run after every character the user types. e.g. you can change the size of the squid on this page[2] and see it reflected immediately on the right.
I've got a few friends who are affected by this who haven't tweeted in months. All posts come from the web interface. Can't find any news or security sites with more info.
Thats been a Labs maps feature for a while in ice cream sandwich. Very useful when visiting places you dont want to spend money on expensive bandwidth, use it a lot...
