Does ssh give access to the virtual console, to a terminal emulator, or what?

Question

As far as I've understood, a terminal emulator is a GUI-based program which gives me a terminal-like viewport and allows me to interact with it just like I'd do with a terminal, except that it has all the support from the X system, so I suspect that ssh user@ip will not give me access to a terminal emulator running on the remote machine. If I want to use that, I need to connect to that machine via VNC, and then open a terminal emulator window in that desktop.

But do I get access to a virtual console (one that, physially on the remote machine I'd get via Ctrl+Alt+F2, for instance)? I can ssh -X ..., which gives me access to the clipboard, which comes with X, so it kind of feels I'm not in a virtual console either...

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As regards the proposed duplicate, since my question is specifically about SSH, the information I can gather is the following:

• Ssh (which connects a terminal on one machine with programs on another machine)

  from the accepted answer,

• pseudoterminals use PTY “devices” to arrange communication between console applications and the terminal-making program that runs in userspace. Examples are X-based terminal emulators and sshd, that allocates a pseudotty for each login session.

  from another answer,

• There may be some application that "emulates" terminal accepting keystrokes from user and sending them somewhere (xterm and ssh are good examples). There is an API in Kernel called pseudo terminal for that. So your tty may really be connected to some application instead of real terminal. Xterm uses X11 to display text and ssh uses network connection for it.

  from yet another answer;

so the answer to my question seems to be "it gives access to a pseudo terminal".

Answer 1

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/4132/153329

pseudo-ttys, are provided (through a thin kernel layer) by programs called terminal emulators, such as Xterm (running in the X Window System), Screen (which provides a layer of isolation between a program and another terminal), Ssh(which connects a terminal on one machine with programs on another machine)

With ssh user@ip you get shell running in pseudo-terminal (not X11 terminal emulator).

With ssh -X you get X11 forwarding - an SSH protocol that enables users to run graphical applications on a remote server and interact with them using their local display and I/O devices.

X11 uses a client-server model, where an X Server is a program on a machine which manages access to graphical displays and input devices (monitors, mice, keyboards, etc.), and an X Client is a program which handles graphical data.

X Servers and X Clients can communicate over remote network.