Related to this, the other day I learned that QEMU will render VGA mode text to your terminal using curses:

  $ qemu -curses …

This also lets you run QEMU over SSH, if you want. I use this in my assembly language course; towards the end I give an assignment to write Hello, World! as a 16-bit real mode MBR bootloader. Students can do the whole thing on our SSH server, including testing in QEMU (and even attaching GDB to it to debug) not needing to install anything locally.

It is very cute. It doesn't take much to use a serial console though, or even enabling SPICE for a fully featured (and detachable).