Remote Apple Events are pretty fantastic. Back in 2002/2003, I wrote an AppleScript Studio application (with a little bit of Objective-C) that let you control iTunes on another machine.
It seemed like absolute magic at the time to me and my friends - from my PowerBook on the couch, we could change the song playing on the iMac on the other side of the room! Wish I still had that source code to look at.