I do the above as well with 1 addition, any of the virtual tabs on my remote host can also run a screen themselves. To control this I use Ctrl-Oo to control the outer screen and ctrl-a for inner screens. This is useful when you have a remote dev server for a particular app and want need multiple connections to it, such as running nodejs server and tailling the output in one shell while using the editor in the other. I only started using this recently but it has worked very well.