That's an interesting idea. I originally wanted to post about how cool the virtual CGI workstation concept was, but what might be better still, is a system / platform where an artist can do as much as they can on their local machine, and outsource requests for preview / final renders to cloud based machines, while streaming the result back to the enduser, with some amount of lag when moving cameras around a preview.

Wouldn't want any amount of lag in the modelling process though. Even disk pauses and garbage collection can prove distracting with that kind of work.