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

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... --- As regards the proposed duplicate, since my question is specifically about SSH, the information I can gather is the following: - > [Ssh](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_shell) (which connects a terminal on one machine with programs on another machine) [from the accepted answer](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/4132/164309) , - > pseudoterminals [use PTY “devices” to arrange communication between console applications and the terminal-making program that runs in userspace](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/117981/what-are-the-responsibilities-of-each-pseudo-terminal-pty-component-software) . Examples are X-based terminal emulators and sshd, that allocates a pseudotty for each login session. [from another answer](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/228052/164309) , - > 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](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/376058/164309) ; so the answer to my question seems to be "it gives access to a pseudo terminal".