Yes, this is probably the correct way to do it, but I think it might be possible, but a nasty hack, to have AppMain.tcl launch pd.term, then Tcl/Wish would exit, then pd.term would launch pd, which would in turn launch the same Wish Shell.app that started the whole process.
Not clean, but it could work. It could also possibly be done with a shell script or even an AppleScript instead of the pd.term file.
what's this, a contest ? I thought the point was to make it clean :D