With this, I wasn't seeing any output with -display curses. It does work with -nographic or using a vnc connection to qemu's display, as well as on the two physical machines I currently have access to.
Oh, I didn't know UEFI text mode didn't use VGA text mode! That could be an important consideration. But I suppose you can still frob the VGA registers to set VGA text mode, right? Even if you boot under UEFI?