AFAIU for 'heavy' 3D applications like AAA games the BW over the PCIe bus to the GPU can be a lot higher than what comes out of the cable to the screen. So just sending (compressed) pixels is not necessarily a bad remoting strategy.
Though for something simple like just rendering GUI widgets the opposite may very well be true.
Either way, it's a cool feature in both toolkits. (Not trying to belittle GTK here.)