My thing is why can we mount remote ntfs via samba and read/write to it and not do it locally? It makes little sence to me.
That's a good question, and if you'll allow me to make a half-assed guess: From cursory inspection, it appears that the APIs for SMB over TCP/IP are built on stuff that was created by IBM back in 1984, then standardized by the IETF in 1987. Microsoft's implementation of it is pretty well documented by Microsoft itself, e.g. on MSDN. In a nutshell, how to "do" native Windows networking is documented well enough that the Samba team could make their own Un*x implementation of it.

OTOH, how to "do" low-level NTFS read/write/etc. access is not. Microsoft tells you enough about its API so that, for example, you can write your own defrag program (on Windows); but Microsoft's not going to tell you enough about how it works at a low level so you can include native NTFS support in your favorite free OS's kernel.

With Samba you can mount NTFS volumes and read and write to them, but remember, it's the actual Windows computer that's still handling the low-level hard drive access. Samba's just "telling it what to do."

(End of half-assed guess. )