SBCL is great. I do think it would be a significant improvement to include a fuller featured terminal REPL out of the box (with history, s-exp editing keystroke

SBCL is great. I do think it would be a significant improvement to include a fuller featured terminal REPL out of the box (with history, s-exp editing keystrokes, completion), and that this would make a better first impression on new users experimenting with the language, before they've given in and installed SLIME - and probably beneficial for the crowd that wants to use their favorite editor rather than Emacs+SLIME, insomuch as they only need to solve the problem of getting definitions reloaded from the editor, without having to also reinvent slime-repl, inspector, debugger, etc.