Yes, it is possible to automate ssh logins, though you do it within ssh and not specific to iTerm.

The magic words are "ssh-keygen", and this howto spells it out pretty well.

http://www.arches.uga.edu/~pkeck/ssh/

My favorite thing to do in iTerm is to have a bunch of little shell scripts in my ~/bin
directory that do what i need them to (& are perhaps useless for anyone else). That
and set the font big and turn off the Internet so that there's space to write.

I installed it recently to give it another try, but it actually crashed once -- not what you want to have happen in a term program, tabs or no. ;) That said, the tabs are nice to have around.

There was a Ruby on Rails demo I linked to a couple of weeks ago that has a great deal of iTerm and TextMate usage, if anybody wants to see them in action: http://www.rubyonrails.com/media/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov

I'd love iTerm more if it wasn't actually *slower* than Terminal.app.

I've replaced Terminal.app with iTerm a couple of months ago ;-) What I like about iTerm is the support for tabbed terminal switching.

ssh-keygen is key, but I actually prefer Terminal. screen is your friend, who needs iTerm when you can get *really* geeky? ;)

I concur. I don't know why I'd want to use iTerm when I can just use screen(8) with better results?

Screen(8) also gives you the ability to do cut/copy/paste operations from your terminal without grabbing the mouse.