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There do seem to be some very complex use cases. On the other hand, their example of parallel gzip of files seems straightforward:

find . -name '*.html' | parallel gzip --best

Generally, using it in places where you would normally use xargs seems uncomplicated.

Probably a stupid question, but how do the remote machines translate the pathnames to local pathnames? And what happens if they fail?

The example above is just running in parallel locally.

A good start is looking at the section 'Remote execution' in 'man parallel_tutorial'.

Spoiler: You can have GNU Parallel kick the machines if the fail, and rerun the job on another machine.