It's a rather massive codebase, and our remote dev machines are a lot beefier than our laptops -- also 64-bit, whereas our laptops are 32-bit. I'm not saying it couldn't be done locally, but it might actually cause more headaches than it solves.
IDEs can work well editing code that is targeted to a different platform. The code is edited locally (and parsed, analyzed, colorized, etc. by the IDE locally) but built and run remotely on other machines. That setup used to be pretty common for enterprise and web development before Moore let us run entire enterprise application servers on our laptops. It takes more work to set up than just sshing into a remote box and firing up emacs, but it can be done.
It might and your approach may be optimal already. I guess it's a question of how much the environments differ? When I am moving to a new project I try to get myself setup so I can make changes and test them as quickly as possible and it's always a judgment call about how much time to spend doing that setup. Also, there is a cultural element like one poster said if everyone is using vim them that becomes a clear choice...
