Great story.

I found myself doing just about the same thing (eerily similar settings in my neighborhood in Brooklyn) when my girlfriend's iPhone was stolen just a few days before WWDC and the Find My iPhone announcement.

At the time I wished for nothing more than this exact technology, but days later when we were reasonably sure we had found (through a few degrees of separation) who had stolen the phone and were still unable to get it back, it dawned on me that this might be one of those social issues that will go mostly technologically unsolved at least for the time being.