It may not be obvious on first sight, but eshell, the shell that is
implemented in Emacs Lisp works fine with tramp:
Welcome to the Emacs shell
~ $ uname -a
Linux local-machine 2.6.30-1-686 #1 SMP Thu Jul 30 14:45:30 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
~ $ cd /ssh:user@remote-machine:~
/ssh:user@remote-machine:/home/user $ uname -a
Linux remote-machine 2.6.18-6-686 #1 SMP Thu Aug 20 21:56:59 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
/ssh:user@remote-machine:/home/user $