As far as I understood, the UI is there to stay. The creator wrote his own game engine that is optimized for printing ascii to a screen-- it's not architected in a way that can plug-and-play with a different renderer.
I would absolutely love if DF looked that good at some point! You're definitely right that just because it's ASCII doesn't mean it can't be visually appealing
Here is a quick animated gif with a few examples of interactions:
http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2014/1...