I wonder if those widgets require GTK support in Emacs. I compile a plain X support for my emacs only, because with GTK it doesn't stay up for months without crashing. I had an emacs server with 180 day uptime the other day. Maybe on my work machine that is Windows anyway, I can try this out. :>
I would like to use Emacs on terminal, but few of keybindings don't work well based on terminal to terminal. For example, last three months I got a Mac for work, and on iTerm "C-/" didn't work for Undo, or some keybindings starting with "Meta". I guess that could be solved by configuring terminal properly with key sequences, but I just ended up using GTK (but well the GTK version crashed whenever I closed one of the multiple frame open). On linux, so far it has worked flawlessly for me.
I'm by no means an Emacs expert or even power user, but I've found Aquamacs to be pretty good for OS X. It's stable and seems to strike a good balance between integrating with native UI functionality and the Emacs way of doing things.
You don't have to use the terminal, and I assume OP isn't, either. Emacs still supports Athena and Motif widgets, among others, if you don't mind the looks.
I'm still on the GTK2 port, largely because I got sick of troubleshooting every GTK application after every GTK release.
If you're on OS X, it's probably worth checking out Aquamacs, too.
