In the latest/forthcoming version of GNU Emacs there exists a daemon mode. The intent is to make it easier to run in one instance of emacs, and rather than starting new instances, you can run everything in one instance. Less overhead on your system, and everyone's happy. Without daemon mode, you can still run in server mode and get nearly the same effect, but you end up with one emacs frame that's the "host," which means, if you're dumb and close it (or it's running inside of another process which crashes...) all of the frames close.
I suppose, as an interjection, that my attempt to explain why this is cool to a generalized audience is somewhat of a lost cause.
In any case, there's a problem daemon mode doesn't behave like anyone would want it to. This post explains it better than anything else I've read thus far, but it's not all that clear. Basically when you start emacs --daemon it doesn't load your .emacs init file correctly, and so things like display settings are off kilter, and can't really be fixed. I resorted to running my "host" emacs frame inside of a terminal/screen session, because that worked and was basically the same from my perspective.
Nevertheless I've discovered "the fix" to the emacs daemon it to work like you'd expect. Run the following command at the command line (changing username and font/fontsize):
emacs -u [USERNAME] --daemon --eval "(setq default-frame-alist \ '((font-backend . \"xft\") (font . \"[FONT]-[SIZE]\")))" -l ~/.emacs
And then, open an emacsclient.
... and there was much rejoicing ...
There are a couple of things that I can't get to work reliably. Most notably, though the emacsclient works in terminal instances, it has some sort of problem with attaching new clients to X after an X crash/restart. No clue what this is about. Not quite sure what the deal is with this, but needing to reboot every time X goes down is a bummer. Other than that? Emacs bliss. For the moment.