IME RDP performance is fine these days if you've got even a halfway decent upstream connection-- the newer clients and servers are much better about tolerating low bandwidth/high latency connections than they used to be (they finally ditched the naive "forward the GDI calls" approach they used to take and do lossy compression much like VNC now).

I don't expose it to the internet, though. Only thing on my home network that is exposed directly to the internet is an SSH gateway (using public key auth, passwords disabled); from there, I can forward SSH or VNC or whatever I need access to.

RDP at home is certainly difficult, but I have to disagree on the performance bit. In fact, RDP is probably by far the best such protocol in use right now.