I need it for Emacs simply because my remote always-on server is, well, always on, and I fairly often access my Emacs from remote sites via emacsclient while the desktop is off. (The desktop is a power sucker, so it goes off when I'm not using it.)
TRAMP is very nice, but without remote display I'd be left running my Emacs on a machine that was turned off, and not even Wayland can do that. :}