Any tips for surviving Terminal.app?

Use iTerm. Its great.

You can install gnome terminal on mac os X using fink, or other unix package tool available on the mac. You will have to have X11 running though which may not be ideal, depending on your needs. Also, I'd suggest learning actual shell specific commands for moving around in a terminal, as those will generally be the same regardless of the terminal emulator you are using. That is, as long as you have a bash shell, Ctrl-a will get you to the beginning of a line in any terminal (gnome terminal, kterm, xterm, rxvt, etc.) assuming that they aren't doing something silly like stealing your control characters!

As noted in other answers, there are also other terminal alternatives for MacOS - iterm2 being a commonly used one.