So? This doesn't mean you can't make it look nice anyway. Check out http://www.ekit.com/ - it looks fine under links, under NS4, IE4, IE5, NS6, ... It's not that hard to make a site that renders fine under text mode browsers...
As does microsoft.com, funnily enough ;-)
In my experience, the trick is using very little table tag magic, spacer GIFs, etc. and put most of the formatting into style sheets. So the (simple) table layout will look good under Lynx/w3m, and the style sheets will do the magic for the "high-end" browser. If there wasn't Netscape 4.x to consider, we could get completely rid of using all the tables and transparent GIFs. But there are surprisingly many people who still use that beast, even on Windows machines ... (and it will not display ANY stylesheet stuff on Linux if you switch off Javascript). Joachim