"but I suspect that managing buffers (and making sure they end up in the right pane) will take as much effort as dragging a few windows around."
I think you'd be surprised. In my experience I have a fixed set of windows (not os windows, but panes, as you called them), and easily and quickly switch between them with Iswitch-buffers: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/IswitchBuffers
this add-on gives you incremental-search to choose among open buffers, and usually it only takes a couple of keystrokes to get the one I want - so instead of moving the mouse around and clicking somewhere small and dragging things around, I am back in business after something like 'C-x b sh' - control-x, b to invoke iswitchb, and 'sh' to get me to my shell buffer...
I think you'd be surprised. In my experience I have a fixed set of windows (not os windows, but panes, as you called them), and easily and quickly switch between them with Iswitch-buffers: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/IswitchBuffers
this add-on gives you incremental-search to choose among open buffers, and usually it only takes a couple of keystrokes to get the one I want - so instead of moving the mouse around and clicking somewhere small and dragging things around, I am back in business after something like 'C-x b sh' - control-x, b to invoke iswitchb, and 'sh' to get me to my shell buffer...