> For local console I've googled and TERM=wsvt25 brings colors to emacs > and vim for me on amd64.
wsvt25 (and wsvt43 and wsvt50) only are 8-color terminals, and that's the best the kernels's console emulation code will provide; and this is not going to change anytime soon. If you want 16 or 256 colors, run X.