Calling tramp a solution for windows is somewhat iffy though. So far I don't think there's an easy way to simply get it to work on windows (the path handling seems to forbid tramp-like paths on windows, which messes with things quite considerably).
Yeah, you can get it to work with putty, but it's nowhere near as reliable as from Mac/Linux to server (and to be fair, network issues make it a less than optimal solution if you have a choice).
These days I just tmux on the server, open emacs and hack away (as long as you can install things on the server).
