In a terminal application we may need to do some terminal-specific things.

for example, this is a feature which is unique to konsole:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103399

However, in a console application we got term=xterm, which isn't very helpful since we cannot know what the terminal application is from the word "xterm".

Anyway to know "I'm in a konsole" for a terminal application?

Try digging through the DBUS interface of konsole. You might be able to find something suitable there. I suggest using qdbusviewer for the task.

For KDE4 Konsole, you can check some Konsole specific environment variables, like KONSOLE_DBUS_SERVICE and KONSOLE_DBUS_SESSION