Using delayed-work for tty flip buffers ends up causing us to wait for
the next tick to complete some actions. That's usually not all that
noticeable, but for certain latency-critical workloads it ends up being
totally unacceptable.
As an extreme case of this, passing a token back-and-forth over a pty
will take two ticks per iteration, so even just a thousand iterations
will take 8 seconds assuming a common 250Hz configuration.
Avoiding the whole delayed work issue brings that ping-pong test-case
down to 0.009s on my machine.
In more practical terms, this latency has been a performance problem for
things like dive computer simulators (simulating the serial interface
using the ptys) and for other environments (Alan mentions a CP/M emulator).