Exactly this. I am thinking of Jupyter Console for one thing, as well as other third-party Jupyter protocol clients such as nvim-ipy.
If by ‘Jupyter Console’ you’re referring to the console tiles on the Juptyer Lab launcher that are 1:1 with the kernel tiles, yes, those are fine since they leverage the KernelManager hierarchy that the kernel tiles use.
I’m unfamiliar with nvim-ipy. Generally speaking, if the application uses jupyter_client to launch a kernel, then it’s a candidate to support remote kernels via provisioners. However, that application’s location relative to the kernel is a function of the provisioner’s requirements. Since Gateway integration is essentially only available for the web-based applications residing on Jupyter Server [*], it really isn’t an option to help with keeping the “client application” on the user’s desktop.
[*] There may be another option, depending on how the application is configured, but I don’t want to mention that here as this topic is already too complicated.