Anyway, this, to me, is the best reason not to try to be too strict about the term "cantrip" by arbitrarily excluding Village and Laboratory from the group, just because they offer the wrong kind of supplemental benefit. Because in practical discussions of actual Dominion strategy, it's almost never useful to talk about cantrips as a group excluding Villages and Laboratories. Offhand, I can't even think of a single example of such a real-world situation.
The major reason why you'd want to talk about "cantrips as opposed to villages" is that you'd be talking about situations where cantrips aren't good enough. Like, where you actually specifically need villages, not just cantrips. And there are tons of those situations, and we commonly discuss them.
Yes, but then you're really just talking about "villages," and the only reason -- if any -- to talk about "cantrips other than villages" is to clarify that it's what you're NOT talking about. That surely doesn't count.
So what are the broad categories of cards we might want to talk about?
Money-giving actions, important in discussions of countering Thief and especially Pirate Ship. They're also particularly good supplements to Minion engines.
I already mentioned "non-drawing non-terminals," good companions for Library and Watchtower.
Vanilla cards, though that comes up more in conversation about card design than strategy.
Gainers, like Workshop/Ironworks/Horn of Plenty -- cards that offer a +Buy substitute, which is sometimes important as a category.
Dual-type cards, which make a lot of interesting combos possible, such as with Tribute, Transmute, and Ironworks. An interesting point here -- mirroring the point I made about including villages and labs in the "cantrip" category for practical convenience -- is that "action/victory" is a dual-type card but "action/attack" is not. I guess "attack" is more of a subtype? But I'm not sure "reaction" is a subtype, and yet "action/reaction" doesn't count either, even though both those types have their own dedicated colors. Again, it's a tug-of-war between literal truth and practical usefulness within a discussion of Dominion rules and strategy.
Attacks are sometimes nice to subdivide into categories like cursing attacks, hand-reduction attacks, deck-inspection attacks, and so on.
I guess most of these categories of cards have terms, if unwieldy ones in some cases. But a few are still missing terminology that would be helpful to have.