system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Terminator] Why are terminators constantly grabbing their targets and throwing them into walls/across the room instead of just snapping their necks?
gpt
Because their hand-to-hand combat is improvised.

The purpose of the Terminator program was to have replaceable soldiers. This started with the T-1 tanks, with the humanoid models still being a prototype based on Sergeant Candy. At best, they were intended to include your typical military martial arts program, but even this wouldn't include neck breaking in its repertoire.

When Skynet took over, they had to pick up where the humans left off. At the time, the only thing the humans had actually designed for field deployment were essentially gun platforms.

Even with humanoid protoypes on file, it would still be awhile before they got into production. We see steps in that direction with mechs like the T-47 finally leading to the first production humanoid model: T-70 (though this may have been reversed engineered from the T-800 in some bootstrap paradox nonsense). But the T-70 is still a walking gun platform.

It's not until we get to T-600 that we get to an actual human-looking bot that isn't simply a glorified gun on legs. But, the point of these was infiltration, so its programming would downplay the use of any superhuman abilities.

The point is, there is no indication that the humans would have provided programming or AI for neck-snapping abilities, since their focus was on replaceable gun platforms.

There is no reason why Skynet would subsequently develop such programming either, since ranged combat with disposal and replaceable drones would be the dominant strategy.

Only once it reached a stalemate and loss was a possibility would it consider infiltration, but at that point, what is it going to use as a basis for a martial AI program? It would most likely consider human martial arts obsolete and its focus on how to most efficiently kill a human being the application of enough firepower.

All of the Terminator's moves that don't relate to firearms are most likely improvised, until you get into really advanced models that begin to exploit human psychology, such as the T-100 and T-X.