My experience using tramp with eshell is that it is painfully slow. However, most of what I would accomplish doing that can be accomplished using tramp with dired instead.
s/with eshell// and I agree. I prefer sshfs, but sometimes you are on Windows and tramp is the only way.
Have you enabled SSH connection sharing? If you have a connection open already, it could leverage that (ssh does it, not tramp).