A/UX supports multiple different sessions out of the box: a simple terminal shell with no GUI, the standard Finder (in both 32-bit and 24-bit versions for that one irritating non-32-bit-safe program you still need to run), and a full-scale X11 desktop without the Finder.
Note as well that you can choose to change your session once, or you can permanently switch to a different session.

Most of the rest of this review will detail the Finder shell, but for completeness sake here is the Terminal. Outside of the GUI rendering, this is a text only environment, as one would expect from UNIX.

I suppose if the X11 install would have worked that I could use the X11 shell...however this is all I managed to get.

The about dialog actually details the running System 7 (which in this case is 7.0.1). Note the massive discrepancy in RAM; the system has 128 MB of RAM installed, yet "Total Memory" says 16 MB...???
That 16 MB is actually what is being assigned to the underlying System 7 process, and is configurable.

The default A/UX Finder desktop, which outside of the "/" drive icon and the alias to a home folder doesn't look that different from System 7.