I use emacs in a work environment that is primarily Vim and where we end up logging in to a lot of machines to do development on, and the two things that turn heads in my emacs setups are my fluent and flexible use of multiple windows and frames, and the fact that I'm always using my local emacs and I use Tramp to remote in to the machines, so I don't have to screw around with .vimrc files on half-a-dozen machines. Both are stock emacs.
It sounds like it's only practical when you know you want to edit things in the first place, as opposed to "it doesn't work, let's restart the service in my existing SSH session and have have a look of the log" sysadmin-style-workflow.
I hate to disappoint, but it really works quite well. Not quite perfectly, but quite well (and most of the trouble I encounter comes from my use of ControlMaster on the SSH side). No, you don't any sort of weird heroics to use it.
I use emacs in a work environment that is primarily Vim and where we end up logging in to a lot of machines to do development on, and the two things that turn heads in my emacs setups are my fluent and flexible use of multiple windows and frames, and the fact that I'm always using my local emacs and I use Tramp to remote in to the machines, so I don't have to screw around with .vimrc files on half-a-dozen machines. Both are stock emacs.