See GNOME bug 547720 for the story, which means that gnome-terminal needs to be rebuilt because otherwise features for VTE > 0.16.15 are not activated, for example turning off the blinking cursor (but only for g-t). Not very high priority of course, but at least now this is documented.
*** Bug 458818 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I've rebuilt it now, even though cursor (non-)blinking was working for me before...