if shells had some more types than a stream of bytes, it'd make sense for 'image' type data to be displayed as images. the pipes you mention are then simply type casts or conversion functions.
I don't know what you think is missing. "Displaying 'image' type data as images" totally works. Are you aware of magic bytes (which I mentioned above)?
never used them, but i'm thinking more in terms of powershell (pretty sure displaing images isn't something it does though). if images in particular work ok then that's one thing that i can scratch off my list of annoyances with ssh.