Running inside tmux seems pretty near perfect for the kind of stuff I do. What are you looking for that tmux doesn't address? Is it just being able to run on machines without ssh, because that seems like a pretty minor edge case.
What I'm working on has 2 use cases:
1. sharing document editing from inside your local machine's emacs with someone else on the Internet (this includes things like quick code review or any of the use cases for etherpad) 2. sharing data from your emacs with the Internet in some way, for example with a mobile app. The current mobile apps for emacs data all have to rebuild the application logic all the time, well, an elnode based org-mode app wouldn't have to do that (for example). In the article I also use the example of the diary.