While perhaps off-topic, I'll chime in with an anecdote in remote computing I had this past Thanksgiving. Short version: If you're an emacs veteran, tramp is the ssh version of ange-ftp. Long version: was down in the San Diego area for Thanksgiving and my development environment (Linux) was up here in San Francisco. Had ssh and VNC access to my Linux server in SF, however the latency was still pretty bad making VNC just barely usable. However I had access to a Mac in San Diego with MacPorts X11 emacs installed. I could then run emacs locally and use tramp to transparently access my remote files via ssh just like the old ange-ftp package. Another benefit is that running a shell within emacs with current tramp buffer will automatically ssh to that same server. Tramp would also work with version control (in this case svn). So the big wins here: 1) local editing speed. 2) efficient network communication (only the file data is transferred) 3) shell and version control support 4) can still use emacs.
sshfs does that, and you don't have to use emacs. Gnome's VFS also does that, with its own protocol that gets exposed as a fuse filesystem for non-vfs applications.
YMMV.
http://www.gnu.org/s/tramp/