I hear you. I've migrated many of my personal services to remote VM's.
Where are you hosting your virtual machines, and what OS primarily do you use? Most recently I am using proxmox on a dedicated server @ OVH at their Montreal datacenter. I'm quote happy with it & them so far, for the price. My ping RTT is about 50ms from home, which is nice enough for UI's & replacing local accessed stuff.
BUT, I still like a really fast local machine. A tablet + smartphone would never cut it for me, for what I do. Though the main reason for my last upgrade was the retina display. I'd been waiting literally *years* excitedly for high res displays (other than the IBM T221 and like). The processor, RAM, and SSD are icing on the cake - my previous 17" MBP had a 512GB SSD (OWC) and 8GB RAM already, with a quad core process (can't recall which model - 2011 17" MBP.).
How do you use the remote VM's as a desktop replacement, are you using VNC or remote desktop? Or just as remote storage / processing?