I'd really suggest you try the standard Terminal without resorting to root.
So much more secure. And you can almost always find ways to get around lack of root unless you're doing deep administrative tasks.
For instance, I'm on satellite internet and get a round-trip ping of about 480ms. It really slows down my DNS lookups to refresh FR and other websites. So I implemented a caching nameserver using named and BIND.
macosxhints.com:
Speed internet browsing via a local domain name server
It's not for everyone but if you have dialup or satellite, it's a real lifesaver. That page shows how you can do a lot of the stuff that might normally be done in root just by using 'sudo bash' instead. Works beautifully.
I give Officers root access to much bigger iron than this platform. Really, this is the least of my worries. The unit will be in a secure room physically accessible to one person, and not networked. If this platform does what i want it to do, the end-user will have a root account and a user account, then it's their business.