Remote sessions. Unless you want to use X forwarding, or create multiple SSH sessions, it's way more ergonomic to do it this way. I currently use tmux for this and when you combine it w/ the tmux command mode (-CC) and iTerm 2 you get the best of both worlds, but even without iTerm 2 integration I still prefer panes to be handled by the multiplexer because then I know I can get my consistent and comfortable environment on any arbitrary remote box.