I'm not a seasoned user or anything, but I prefer to use Emacs with a GUI rather than in the terminal. It has nothing do with there being more GUI-type things in there - I have things like save-icons etc. turned off. It just feels more like it's own application in GUI mode (if I run it in terminal mode, the Meta hotkey doesn't work as usual, which I suspect is because the terminal is using the alt-key (meta) for something else and so it overrides that hotkey). Why should I prefer to use Emacs in terminal mode? I am honestly open to changing my mind.
In my experience, any sort of filesystem remoting a la sshfs simply doesn't perform well enough to do real editing work in. One of the really nice things about vi is that it was originally designed for low-bandwidth situations, so using it over ssh is quite snappy even on a marginal network. If I had to use sshfs from home to edit files on my production servers I would probably have to kill myself.
I agree. I can comfortably get seconds ahead of what's displayed on my phone, when needing to fix something in an area of poor coverage. Knowing my ASCII chart can come in handy, on the limited phone keyboard, though...
Another potential advantage to running from a terminal is that you inherit shell variables that can be used in the editor or in utilities run from the shell. Of course, you can set these for GUI-mode emacs (or vim), but I've found terminal windows and screen a good way of isolating contexts and making sure things are set up appropriately.
