> However, due to the elegance of the plan9 architecture, instead of having the app run in the terminal window or over a laborious x-windows protocol, it writes quickly over the network to the window that you invoked the command from.

I don't understand the distinction you are trying to make with the phrsase "quickly over the network". SSH and networked X aren't exactly slow. The latter can be a slug with a bad network, but I recently had to do something kind of fringe and ended up running firefox over wifi with ssh -Y, and it was usable.

You can argue that protocols, implementation, API, etc. are better with plan9 (consistent with claims I heard before) but I don't totally understand how that would necessarily translate into performance (if anything I would expect things used by more people over more time would be better tuned).