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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
Lionel pointed to the real cause of this -- bug 864609 -- for Xfce. I think this bug could be set as a dup. Thank you, dear sir. BUT note that this will only create entries if -- after fixed -- xfce-terminal is used.
@Charlie: the problem here is not actually Xfce, or Gnome, or any other SM. Sort of. The utmp protocol is unreliable -- it was originally written for the command line UNIX, and it was never -- to my knowledge -- ported to X. For the data to be reliable, all programs would have to use it (or all session managers, under a graphical environment). Most do not...
I am not sure there is an equivalent under the graphical environment. So... if you go to a pseudo-terminal and log in, 'who' will report it -- because /bin/login calls the utmp protocol to update the entries. Most terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal, roxterm, xterm, xfce-terminal -- either populate utmp, or have an option to do so. But, chances are you will have no entries there if you just logged in on your graphical environment.
The email I linked (from the Coreutils ML, upstream) in bug 268780 has a very succint explanation:
"The utmp file is a very old part of unix-like systems. I doubt if
today, 30 years later, that it would be implemented the same way that
it was originally implemented bay back then. Note that the utmp and
wtmp files are running totals kept by various system programs. Some
programs put things in. Other programs take things out. If any
problems arise then the state is out of sync. Some information is
similar and duplicated from the system's "syslog" file. There is very
little good use of the utmp file today. This is as true on GNU/Linux
as it is on HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, etc."
I do think it might be interesting to come up with an equivalent for the graphical environment; this would have to be agnostic (and, probably, under freedesktop.org, Linux Standard Base, or whatever) so it could be used by all graphical environments. I very much expect a lot of discussions on even deciding on what would be logged, if it is accepted at all.