Is it acceptable to change the vid column of a term programmatically in the database? I need to move some terms from one vocabulary to another by retaining all their data: translations, aliases, and node references.

Is it acceptable to change its vid column value directly in the database? The terms don't have hierarchy relationships which needs to be handled.
Database
It's possible to do a lot of things in Drupal simply by making SQL queries, either through Drupal or externally. Generally, you never want to take this approach. There are some cases where it can work just fine, but most of the time there is no reason to do it this way.
API
Drupal has a rich API, this is true for Drupal 6, 7 and 8, as they has always been a key feature in Drupal. In your concreate example, you could use taxonomy_term_load and taxonomy_term_save to facilitate an update of a term. Doing it this way, you can edit any data part including the vid. Just because you do it with API's doing forbidden things wont just automatically work, but the chance of things going well is drastically improved.
In this concrete example the API doesn't do anything that is necessarily needed. It sets some internal data on the term and invoke hooks letter module know that is has been updated.
You should note that things can break, if the term you want to change is part of a hierarchy. Things can also break for nodes referencing the term, if the field is not allowed to reference terms in the new vocabulary.
Migration
Migration of data is the bullet proof solution, and unless you have a huge data set, it can be developed and executed pretty easily. The idea is to create a new term and migrate the content you want to migrate and then delete the old term. As an update hook, sample code could look like this:
/**
 * Put in modules .install file, replace xxxx with 7000 or higher
 */
function MODULE_NAME_update_XXXX(&amp;$sandbox) {
  $term = taxonomy_term_load(CONSTANT_WITH_TID);
  $new_term = clone $term;
  unset($new_term-&gt;tid);
  unset($new_term-&gt;tid);
  $new_term-&gt;vid = CONSTANT_WITH_VID;
  taxonomy_term_save($term);
  // Find all nodes we want to update and update them.
  // If there is a lot of nodes, can use $sandbox to make this a batch job.
  $query = new EntityFieldQuery();
  $query-&gt;entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
    -&gt;fieldCondition('field_which_is_term_reference', 'tid', $term-&gt;tid);
  $result = $query-&gt;execute();
  foreach (node_load_multiple(array_keys($result['node'])) as $node) {
    $node-&gt;field_which_is_term_reference[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['tid'] = $term-&gt;tid;
    node_save($node);
  }
  // Migration all done - delete the old term.
  taxonomy_term_delete($term-&gt;tid);
}

Please note that the above code is pure example code, written by heart. Might have syntax error or other errors and makes a lot of assumptions. This is just to illustrate an idea and demonstrate that a migration might not be a big deal.