Yes, as I said in the initial post, I know that is possible, but it misses the point. This requires a host that you want to develop on and as I move more to the cloud (i.e. hosting on Heroku), I am less likely to have a server to SSH into.
Work in a screen session and you'll be able to pick up where you last left off --from any machine. Not to mention your VPS is almost certainly faster than your laptop and connected to a bigger pipe than whatever wifi you're borrowing, so downloading a .tar.gz or a git clone will be fast, and compiling won't eat up your battery life.
(I'm just a customer, no affiliation)
Edit: looks like they're not accepting new customers right now. sorry.
I'm a new customer of their service and very happy with the price/quality, but you do have to have a technical background.