If you're doing software development without an asynchronous work pipeline in 2013 then you have a problem. Regardless of remote or local work, long periods of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast majority of productive work is performed in any given software project. That being the case it makes perfect sense to optimise the pipeline around this very basic fact.
Once that is out of the way, whether you're local or remote is basically irrelevant. All the disadvantages to remote work have always centered around an insufficiently asynchronous work pipeline. I say this as someone who presently travels the world and works on a large array of projects and would never even consider a role that attempts to change that part of my life, simultaneously in the past having worked extensively in async and non async environments both local only and remote.
> long periods of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast majority of productive work is performed in any given software project.
That's only true in some projects, and perhaps not even the majority.
It seems like a very developer-centric perspective. But there are a lot of projects where the real value comes not from the actual programming, but in how everything is tied together, in the prioritizing, in consistency, in common understanding, with continuous improvements that deliver what's actually needed. The programming may be relatively trivial, but good management and teamwork is highly complex, and you need smart employees who are all able to see the big picture and keep on top of it.
This is a very common scenario (more common, in my experience), and whether you're local or remote makes a huge difference.
Once that is out of the way, whether you're local or remote is basically irrelevant. All the disadvantages to remote work have always centered around an insufficiently asynchronous work pipeline. I say this as someone who presently travels the world and works on a large array of projects and would never even consider a role that attempts to change that part of my life, simultaneously in the past having worked extensively in async and non async environments both local only and remote.