As already noted, commands that deal with a lot of data will copy that data to your machine to process, and copy it back. This is a drawback of both NFS and sshfs.
NFS, however, doesn't encrypt, while sshfs does, so if you don't care about encryption, NFS will be a lot faster.
The proper way to do what you want is to install those desktop tools on the remote machine, and then use ssh X forwarding (ForwardX11 and ForwardX11Trusted in the manual, also -X and -Y) to have those programs run on the remote machine, but display their GUIs on your local desktop. This way you get the nice graphical interfaces while still doing all the hard work on the remote machine, without copying tons of data back and forth.
NFS, however, doesn't encrypt, while sshfs does, so if you don't care about encryption, NFS will be a lot faster.
The proper way to do what you want is to install those desktop tools on the remote machine, and then use ssh X forwarding (ForwardX11 and ForwardX11Trusted in the manual, also -X and -Y) to have those programs run on the remote machine, but display their GUIs on your local desktop. This way you get the nice graphical interfaces while still doing all the hard work on the remote machine, without copying tons of data back and forth.