Comment 7 for bug 1116791

For the xorg source package it looks like the dependency was added long ago just as a convenience to ensure a terminal program was included. Possibly there might be a debian failsafe session that pops it up, but I'm not spotting evidence of such; in any case that wouldn't be important to us.

For the xinit package, xterm is the default program run if no window manager is used, so it's a more legitimate dependency there. However, we use lightdm rather than xinit in our boot process (e.g. creating a ~/.xinitrc that echos to a file and rebooting doesn't generate the file; and I don't see xinit listed in a raring bootchart). xinit is used if you start x using the `startx` command, but that's not really a use case for us. There might be other use cases where xinit is important, but for a regular desktop session I think it may be just vestigial.