leaving comint.el for a better emacs shell

[Terrence Brannon <thequietcenter@gmail.com>]

I would like to have a shell which
  1. allows me to have multiple shells, with descriptive names, based
on the current working directory of the buffer I am in
  2. opens shells on remote machines, should the current working
directory be on a machine I have accessed via tramp
  3. reads .bashrc files

I need to rule out comint.el and find something else, because
comint.el does not work with a simple Perl script:


yet M-x term and M-x eshell both do

Eshell sounds neat, but I dont think it sources .bashrc files, does
it?
And term is OK, but how about getting multiple terms with descriptive
names?