As Eli requested, restating what I'm asking ...
I start the emacs daemon from a terminal by:
emacs --daemon
During startup, there might be some prompts (e.g., I get a pagination prompt from parsing a tar file, when emacs is loading my last session's files), and I can deal with them at the terminal.
When I shutdown the emacs daemon, I would like to also do this at the terminal:
emacsclient -e '(save-buffers-kill-emacs)'
but that doesn't work if there are any prompts (e.g., saving a file or killing a shell process).
A work-around is to do:
emacsclient -c -e '(save-buffers-kill-emacs)'
and that lets me see the prompts in the minibuffer.
However, it seems that "emacsclient -e" has access to the terminal's stderr.
Evidence: I get an error message at the terminal (not in a minibuffer) if I do something with an error, such as
emacsclient -e '(man fprintf)'
If stderr is being passed in to the evaluation code in daemon mode, then it would be nice to also have stdin passed in, which would allow interaction at the terminal.
However, this is a fairly minor improvement, given that "emacsclient -c -e" works as expected, so probably it's not worth spending time on. (And the documentation/emacswiki could be improved so that other people like me don't bother you.)