Ok, I take that back then. Vim/emacs only have a weight/speed advantage then.

I do, however, find it useful that I can be ssh'd into a machine, doing stuff in bash, and I can fire up vi. I suppose that's a separate discussion though.

Emacs has Tramp, which lets you edit files, manipulate directories (with dired), and do many other stuff you normally do on files seamlessly on remotes of all kinds, including ssh. If you're using emacs like vi where you start it up for each file and close when you save, you're extracting no value out of it, just use Zile.

This feature is somewhat less useful with the advent of sshfs.

It depends on what you do with it, as it does more than ssh. For example there's /sudo:: with which you can edit local files as other users. Also I have links to remote files in my Org files, and if I have ssh-agent running (which I always do), all I have to do to go to that file/directory is to click the link.