@burrows - thank you for this ! Copy paste has been so much a pain that it is the single biggest reason for me to consider a Mac. I am envious of the mac people who copy paste effortlessly from a gvim session on to a remote tmux vim session.
Now nearly all terminals have a clipboard handler (eg. for Gnome Terminal, ctrl+shift+v), but naturally this just blindly types the text. Does this mac person have the ability to do anything more than this? Maybe with X forwarding you could get a remove vim session with clipboard handlers to directly work with your clipboard.
The real problem is none of this is automatic, but the mac guy would need to go through most of these hoops as well, for the tools specified.
If it's the latter, then most linux setups wouldn't need any configuration if you used the terminal's inbuilt copy paste.