Just curious - what would be desirable about an actual telnet service that does this? You seem disappointed that it wasn't that, but I'm struggling to understand the advantages.
if you had telnet/rest or any other standardly documented access point, I could schedule stations with a cron script. Have a hardware button with an arduino. The sky is the limit.
The way it is now, it's just a toy. nothing other than a slightly more inconvenience to use than pandora. it doesn't really add anything different. Well i could emulate keystrokes and expose an API myself, but then i could already do that emulating mouseclicks in pandora anyway.