I'm not convinced of this. I used ssh -X to connect to my desktop PC, ran OpenOffice and it was quite usable on the N800 tablet (provided you have a bluetooth keyboard or N810). Even with the toolbars on. Heck, I even did some Ruby On Rails development using Aptana/Eclipse over ssh on my N800 :-) Try it and you might be surprised

But what does help anyway is to gain as much height as possible since we have a nice wide screen, so I drag all the toolbars to the left and right, which allows you to see more of the document. I do this on the PC as well.