The issue was initially discussed here [0] and then followed up here [1] where Pádraig mentioned that he needed to know why termite requires a separate TERM. I would like to follow this up by linking this [2] discussion.
Pádraig, if you're reading this but don't want to read the whole Talk:Termite page, the gist is provided by thestinger (primary termite developer): "The terminfo for VTE and xterm is fairly different. For example, Termite supports italic text and it won't work if TERM is set to xterm. Even the backspace key won't work properly anymore for sane applications relying on terminfo rather than hardcoding dozens of escape sequences."
I hope you can see the need for accepting this small patch as it makes the lives a bit easier for those of us using termite.
Sven