You didn’t quite answer my question (I am not a UNIX expert). Can you divert the desktop and all saved files to a network server? Invisibly? Netbooting has nothing to do with that (jesus, do people actually do that outside of a SAN?).
Yes. In UNIX, a user never needs to know where his files are. As I said, with X11 (which OS X ships with but isn't used by default) you don't even know where your programs are being run from. Every instance of everybody's word processor could be actually running on a server and they wouldn't even know it.
That's how UNIX is, totally networked long before NT was a twinkle in Gates' eye.