I never understood why skynet would choose an Austrian accent for his gigantic robot to send to Los Angeles and I understood even less why people didn't think he was weird until he started shooting them.
actually, I believe in the original script, the terminator was supposed to be an average sized dude, more like the guy that played kyle reese, or the t-1000. the idea was something inconspicuous that no one would notice until it attacked with inordinate superhuman strength.
Then a big muscle-bound tough guy from the future would come back and fight it. the way it worked out turned out to be more interesting than that, I think. at least visually; it depicted humans more as the underdog, since the human hero was the scrawny guy, and that increased the tension of the plot.
If you really want to rationalize a muscly robot assassin with a foreign accent, idk if you ever played the earthsiege/starsiege games --basically man vs. computers but in the future, with mechs, throughout the solar system...
their lore for the 'cybrids' was really developed, and part of it included the cybrids doing experiments on humans to find the best ways to suppress and intimidate them. based on that, they designed some of their military units to be visually frightening, as well as making beastly noises or speaking in scary voices, if I recall. In fact their tactics got a bit more morbid than that. but it's interesting to wonder how a hostile artificial intelligence would study human psychology and incorporate intimidation in its designs.
that game series had a really well developed universe and a Fantastic storyline... Tribes and Tribes 2 are based in the same universe, far in the future. it'd be great if someone revisited it eventually.
/endtangent
as you can see we've hit on one of the few things I'm really geeky about