My friend Matthias (wiemann.name) does that with his MB Air and he's totally happy with it. If you need web inspector, an iPad really isn't an option. I'd still recommend trying out a remote server, it's fun.
Yeah, I'd definitely love to try it at some point. Besides the cool stuff it enables you to do (like the data-crunching you mentioned in the article), there's definitely something really appealing about the minimalism of relying almost exclusively on command-line tools in a more meaningful way than just having a terminal window open as one of a dozen apps in a window manager.
