It’s more like emacs-flavored RPC. You can edit files on remote hosts using TRAMP, and you can transparently execute processes on the remote host. If you’re editing a remote file and invoke, say, a compiler it will transparently run the compiler on the remote host against the remote file.

Similar, yes. It supports many more protocols than SSH though[0]. It also supports multi-hops, even across multiple protocols if it can[1]. So you could say: access a remote server over SSH, and then pivot to a Windows machine behind a firewall using Samba, all by simply specifying a file path to do that.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html#Connecti...

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html#Ad_002dh...

TRAMP is general access via ssh, e.g. you can also use it for executing binaries on the remote machine. In the case of remote files it does something like `base64 -D <(ssh remote base64 remote-file) > tempfile` for read and the inverse for write.