Google is looking to offer a native Terminal app for Android, possibly with Android 16. The Terminal app will allow installation of a Linux VM with full GUI and GPU acceleration along with other sysadmin features including disk resizing, port forwarding, and partition recovery. This is an extension of Google's earlier project of allowing Chrome OS to run on Android using the Android Virtualization Framework.
It’s probably just something that one of the AOSP devs wanted (to scratch an itch and all of that). It might also mean they won’t have a GUI app to manage the VM initially and you’ll just use the new Terminal.