I run oneiric with fluxbox as the window manager, and gnome-terminal appears to disregard gtk theme. The theme support does work in other gtk applications (for example, in gthumb and in firefox), but changing the theme makes no difference for gnome-terminal. I have oneiric, and I use lxappearance to change the theme. Am I wrong in assuming that gnome-terminal is a gtk application? Or is the problem elsewhere?
Note that the checkbox "Use colours from system theme" in gnome-terminal configuration does not solve the problem, nor it is supposed to, since I am interested in the look and size of the menu, and the tabs, not their colour. ]
LXAppearance version is 0.5.1, and so it appears that it is GTK3 compatible. It even creates the file gtk-3.0/settings.ini in the home directory which contains the selected settings. This, I think, rules out http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=631897 as a possible cause.