I did something like this using the Curses & Curses::UI. It ended up being a formbidable monstrosity spanning several thousand lines(the saving grace being the maxim about "planning to build a second one--you will anyways"). And the initial justification was the same--avoid the overhead of a LAMP stack, avoid adding layers of web-related complexity, avoid locking into a certain gui lib, and ensure portability is as wide as possible. Debugging little quirks in Curses::UI which required custom overrides with Curses code was an especially painful. So I wouldn't recommend text mode for anything but the most linear application.

Just think of it this way--go the Curses route and spend a month on your app. Or use a barebones web stack such as one of the very simple pure Perl HTTP servers(HTTP:Server::Simple), and some basic CGI and you can have the whole app done in an afternoon. Then just use Putty to establish the port forwarding to reach the web server.

It'll look better from a user perspective, the code will be more scalable and you'll save a lot of time.