In Debian sid at least Terminal (as well as gnome-terminal) crash with a segfault in libvte. The window briefly appears, but Terminal crashes immediately afterwards. I haven't been able to get debugging symbols for libvte installed, but someone who beat me to report the bug in debian did: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=548471
Seems to have been an issue in vte. Closing this.