How to remote control Windows?

Ignoring your "I'd like it to be textual" comment for a moment, the obvious answer is remote desktop. Now, not ignoring that answer, we've had good success with PSExec from sysinternals (now part of microsoft). It allows you to exec a command on the remote box. Remember though, many things you're going to want to do expect to have a graphical shell. Also, the newer versions of Windows and some apps (Exchange, IIS, VMWare) support powershell and you have some remote execution options there too.

Windows has telnet (can be enabled using services.msc) but this is insecure.

An SSH server can be obtained from http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/

I've had good experience with freeSSHd.

http://www.freesshd.com/

You can install the SSH server on Windows using Cygwin. From there, you can use the command-line net commands to do lots of cool remote and automated tasks.