You are right about that. What you will miss though, are the plugins and customization while making big edits.

Never missed that on the remote systems. The out of the box vi/vim is powerful enough for most things.

You say that, I remember when my team lead was managing a Solaris box and he asked me to take a look as Vim was not working correctly. So I moseyed over and turns out it was Vi instead of Vim. He got confused by c$ not deleting everything to the end of the line.