Submitted as an enhancment request to Debian: The gnome frontend has tree buttons, namely Cancel, Back and Forward, that do what they say. The dialog frontend has only two, Ok and Cancel. The latter is really Back, not Cancel, so maybe it should be named so. Also a real Cancel could be added. I miss one more thing from both frontends: The last question has the same Forward/Ok buttons as the other questions, so there's no way to guess it's actually going to finish the configration process and that there will be no way to press Back or Cancel after hitting Forward. I think it should be named Finish. It would be even better to have a numbered list of the questions on the screen with the current question highlighted, if it's possible.
You _could_ describe what is the problem with whiptail, instead of forwarding the debconf problem you are facing... Also, this is not a bug more like a wishlist. Lalala. Downgrading, will look into it later (just btw, you are lucky since i'm the kde debconf frontend author so i have at least some clue what you are talking about :P). Anyway since debconf is pretty much dead, the problem will probably be fixed by cdebconf in some foreseeable future. Thus priority -> low.
whiptail from newt-0.52.5 has new options to change the text of buttons.