At this point the user can read from and/or write to the file. However, just as when the file was opened, the desired operations are actually performed on the remote machine on behalf of the user.
One way to think of this is that there is just one additional layer of abstraction between the file system and the hardware. Rather than the file system interacting directly with the device drivers, it interacts with the remote file system (with some form of network interface between them) which in turn interacts with the device drivers on the remote machine.