Notably, there is as an alternative to this node terminal btc client.
electrum -g [text | stdio]
The terminal interfaces could use more testing to say the least, but Electrum has been around since 2011. It's written in Python and includes support for CLI based multisignature transactions [1], raw transactions, proxies, and server selection. It was recently added to the Debian official repos.
It's actively used in ecommerce [2], and we've even heard on #electrum freenode of at least one Bitcoin exchange using it on the backend.
Electrum uses a deterministic mnemonic address generation system (soon to be BIP0032 compatible) and the Stratum protocol, which involves running a gateway daemon [3] and bitcoind on the backend, to tackle the large size of the blockchain and rather unwieldy individualized address generation scheme in use by Bitcoin-QT.
