WARNING: terminal is not fully functional

[Irving Kimura]

I find it infuriating that M-x shell does not give me a fully
functional bash (or rather, a fully functional terminal).  For
instance, I can't pipe things through less ("WARNING:  terminal is
not fully functional").  And /bin/ls --color results in gobbledygook.
Etc.

Of course, my main reason for using M-x shell is to be able to
treat stdout as any other Emacs buffer.  (In particular, I find it
very useful to be able to easily copy selected chunks of stdout to
another Emacs buffer.)  Is this capability fundamentally antithetical
to a "fully functional terminal" that would allow me to pipe outputs
through less, run /bin/ls --color, run man, run top, etc?  If not,
is there any way to configure Emacs so that M-x shell operates
under a "fully functional terminal"?

Thanks!!!

        -Irv