Remote API is extremely slow
Don't forget that the remoteapi executes your code locally and only calls appengine servers for datastore/blobstore/etc. operations. So in essence, you're running code that's hitting a database living over the network. It's definitely slower.
I use the remote API for some utility tasks, and I've noticed that it is orders of magnitude slower than code running on Appengine. A simple get_by_id(list) took a couple of minutes using the remote API, and a couple of seconds running on Appengine.
The logs show that the remote API fetched separately taking a couple of seconds each; whereas on Appengine the whole list of objects is retrieved in about the same time.
Is there any way to improve this situation?