Network transparency at the GUI is not the way the "heavily networked world" is going though. In a lot of ways it doesn't scale. You want to administer and run things in a programmatic way, which means command line or an application specific protocol (which would have front-ends) so you can script and write tools for it and have that work over 1 or N machines.

So very few new things that require remote operation in the past 20 years should have baked in the requirement for a networked GUI.