ssh is a
commandline utility. putty is certainly much closer to xterm than ssh. Its related utility plink would be closer to raw ssh.
But PUTTY does not have that feature. I suppose it's a slightly different class of beast -- it's a terminal
emulator, it doesn't wrap an actual terminal object. This gives it some abilities an xterm doesn't have, and some limits xterm doesn't as well. It's also what makes it portable outside UNIX. I'm sure it'd be possible to add that option to PUTTY, but it wouldn't be portable.
To view its commandline options,
see here.