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My question is related to Keyboard and Console, but I want to do it for an arbitrary pseudo terminal, and not just the built-in Linux ones.
Also, I'm not interested in a stream, I just want the current state.
I'd imagine that if I cat the resulting file with the cursor at 0x0 and same terminal settings, the screen would look exactly like it did when the snapshot was taken.
AFAIK normal shell, nor default Linux console don't provide such facilities, but many terminal emulation programs do - e.g. KDE's Konsole has the option "Save output as..."
If your current terminal emulator doesn't support that (e.g. you're on the system console, text mode, or on a genuine serial terminal, not emulated), you can always launch the GNU Screen command: screen. It provides hundreds of rich functionalities to the console, and among them there's hardcopy - ctrl-A h saves currently visible screen contents to a file hardcopy.[nr]. More on the subject in the documentation.
screen -X allows you to send arbitrary command to an already running screen session, so you can execute the command to dump a hardcopy from a script running outside Screen.