Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, but at my company we have some people who work in an office and lots more that work remotely. The in office staff contribute more ideas, work, fixes, and functional software than the remote teams by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system. It's simply easier to hash out hard problems in person that it is on a remote team, and the context is key. You have all the little asides, ah ha's! and comments collected up that provide a better picture than any remote team can get unless they have their headsets on the whole time.
Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially.
What this has allowed us to do is beat out other development teams, both inside and outside the company. Hasn't gone unnoticed - we also get the most important projects and are paid the most. When it matters, the in-house people get the work.
YMMV, of course, this is just one place, but I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren't interested in their success as making their work life easier.