The auctex-11.14 ebuild dies if Emacs is compiled without Xaw3d support, but auctex seems to work fine, even when run from the console version of emacs. I don't know if the original auctex bug which prompted the requirement is still around, but it seems a bit silly to require X for anyone wishing to use auctex. Could this perhaps just be changed into a warning instead?
Okay, I moved ewarn part to pkg_postinst and removed die. Please refer to bug #18518 for detail. Thanks for reporting.