That's already here. Android has native terminal in the developer settings and it even has a Wayland graphical environment. I have run Weston with a desktop chromium inside, playing a youtube video with sound.

But no root.

The Android terminal has root access. It's a full Debian VM, with hardware-accelerated Wayland graphics through virgl. Of course, that only works on devices supporting pKVM.

A root account violates principle of least priviledge. With proper design a root account should not be needed.

True but accessing your own files, pinging, network management etc aren't included in the things an Android terminal user can do. Hence the need for root.

/mnt/shared has access to your personal files and pinging just works.

This is as the default 'droid' user, but I also have a root user (but that's only root within the terminal)

That sounds like more of a need to be able to share files and folders with the terminal app and for there to be a ping command callable from nonroot added.

"Root" in this case can be normal users without privileges who are granted root-like capabilities granularly, not necessarily a true root account.

Maybe, but the user ought to be able to do with their device the equivalent of what a root account can do, even if not especially conveniently. Like seeing what data apps are saving to their devices or spoofing data to prevent apps from gaining unauthorized information. Apps should not be protected from the user, and user should have recourse from apps doings things not in their interest.