Wordpress - Solution to render Shortcodes in Admin Editor

It's actually not too bad to do what you're asking. This should take you about an hour to do your first one, and 10 minutes to do subsequent ones.

Ultimately what you're going to do is create a TinyMCE plugin. Here's what you should arm yourself with to start:

  1. General guide to creating a tinymce plugin
  2. Example code from WordPress Core
  3. A general guide on adding a TinyMCE plugin to WordPress. I found this one, which seems adequate.

You now have all the tools to get 'er done! Of all this, the code that will be of most interest to you is this block in the WP example code:

4   function replaceGalleryShortcodes( content ) {
5       return content.replace( /\[gallery([^\]]*)\]/g, function( match ) {
6           return html( 'wp-gallery', match );
7       });
8   }
9
10  function html( cls, data ) {
11      data = window.encodeURIComponent( data );
12      return '<img src="' + tinymce.Env.transparentSrc + '" class="wp-media mceItem ' + cls + '" ' +
13          'data-wp-media="' + data + '" data-mce-resize="false" data-mce-placeholder="1" alt="" />';
14  }

Here, the shortcode for a gallery gets replaced with an img tag. The img tag has the class wp-gallery, which gets styled by the CSS found here.

Edit 2016-04-06: Updated content and links for TinyMCE 4 and WordPress 4.4