In some email I received from Greywolf, sie wrote:
[...]
> They're not in the same device numberspace because they're not the same
> devices.  The /dev/pts space is set up by ptmx which basically plumbs
> a stream between device and process and effectively removes, i.e., 
> the daemon from the loop, so it doesn't actually have to process anything
> under Solaris.  The telnetd establishes the ptmx connection and then
> hands all the back/forth communication to the kernel directly.  Since
> the ssh processing layer is not built into the kernel, sshd uses
> BSD-style ptys and has to remain alive and tend to the encryption.

You're confusing technology here.

The passing of data between TCP connections for telnet/rlogin and the
pty is possible because both "endpoints" are STREAMS in the Solaris
environment.  The code which actually does this is NOT trivial - RTFS.
For starters, there is a telnet kernel module which does all the passing
and what not.

Darren