It's an interesting idea. I wonder how it would work in the case of jobs where there's a strong interpersonal component. You could get someone who looks great on paper but who is a bad communicator or doesn't interact well with other people.

On the one hand, face-to-face does allow all these preconceptions and prejudices to happen. On the other, it allows the team to assess those things that actually matter in meetings, presentations, and other face-to-face venues.

Perhaps for a purely distributed company, this wouldn't matter. But in many existing cases, the face-to-face is still a factor.