Sorry. Briefly got "serial shell" and "telnet shell" mixed up. I'm always switching those terms around, since to me, the look exactly the same. I know the difference between them (the former is a hard wired connection requiring physical proximity, the latter is a network connection requring the proper server-side software to be installed and running), I just think of them in the same way. I probably shouldn't.
Anyway, to clarify it for the original poster: You can get a shell prompt right on its screen (via a USB keyboard), you can do a serial connection (with the right hardware dongle connected to certain pins on the motherboard), and you can do a telnet connection (if you can figure out how to install/activate a telnet server via the USB keyboard).