I use it every day with rlogin-program set to a non-default ssh client (which isn't suitable for other ssh uses, e.g. in tramp), so I would be sad if it went away. Using shell with the default directory couples the remote execution with remote file access which I find undesirable. It is not very performant in the environments I use to access remote files via tramp. Using rlogin, I can do m-x cd to set the default directory for the rlogin buffer to a local (i.e. on the machine running emacs) path of the same filesystem I am using on the remote machine. In this case tracking of directory changes works correctly but I also have fast (local) tab completion and file opening.