As far as speed goes: Transfers: ~1000s times faster (thanks to Rsync as fimdomeio says); Browsing: ~10x (thanks Paramiko); Deletion: ~100x (SSH/rsync beats SFTP recursion).
Although one day I am going to write a FUSE/driver that implements all this and avails it for SSHFS, because it's hard to beat that Finder integration...
How is it going to get "~1000s times faster" ust by using rsync? Rsync'll still be using the ssh channel to connect
Unless by "~1000s times faster" it means "skip all the files it doesn't need to transfer" ... which is not transferring faster - it's transferring less
one uses sftp the other uses rsync for file transfer. Rsync is known for transfering multiple files way faster than sftp. Also one transfers the other syncs but I guess one can figure that out by the names.