Excellent news to hear. In a lot of ways the steam release has been a step back, and it's good to see us getting back to where we were before the release.
Wow, I didn't realize that Dwarf Fortress is being developed on Windows. Up until this point, I'd naively assumed that this game had been initially developed for TTYs and only later ported to graphical operating systems! Go figure, huh?
By default, even if it looks like a TTY, DF renders to a graphical buffer. Most TTYs are too slow to play dwarf fortress, but you can actually configure it to render to a terminal. It's just not the default.
Yes. I believe that they actually have some of that available on the beta branch right now. Putnam has also been adding support for gpu offloading as well.