It seems that matplotlib is going to support pickling figures (matplotlib/matplotlib#1020). Wouldn't it be nice to have a new pylab backend which sends png/svg figure and also pickled figure? This way, you can get inline figure in the notebook client but also GUI figure in the terminal client. You can even choose GUI backend to use at the client side.

I guess there will be a trouble when the ZMQ shell and client use different matplotlib version so you will need to detect incompatible version some how.