Putty is a standard Windows application with good GUI and proper integrations. I prefer good GUI apps whenever possible. Not sure of any particular advantage, but terminal is definitely better with putty.
PuTTY definitely works well but calling the GUI "good" might be a stretch. It's pretty unintuitive. As a quick example, I'm always feel like clicking "save" is going to save over the highlighted session settings instead of inserting the new session name I've typed in the box.
Also in general changing settings is clunky enough that this post is about a tool that edits the registry directly so that you don't have to change settings through the GUI.
I agree but that's pretty small issue and it's easy to use once you understood it. Another issue is that I always forgetting where default username is located (it's in Connection\Data). But overall it's usable and it's much faster to navigate in GUI rather than reading ssh manual, especially when you need that option once in a few years.
It's not open source, but the free version has minimal limits and it's way easier to use and includes a portable version.
I like that I can pop open a local terminal and scp files from my windows drives. It also includes x-forwarding, although I mostly handle that with x2go.
