Allan, thanks I didn't know about Command-t it looks extremely useful.
Niels is right : C-x C-f in Emacs opens a status line and a buffer where you can browse/navigate starting from the buffer's current directory, to any other directory and using Tab completion. So you can very quickly browse out to say /Volumes/webdav/etc/etc and open a file with just a few keystrokes.
But I think just dropping folders onto my Project pane and using Command-t will be a good alternative though.
Alex