If there's a status-quo bias, it runs the other way. In college, I led a website rewrite with team members in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, France, and Australia, with the site owner in Florida. For my first startup, my cofounder and I usually worked remotely, though we were within driving distance so we could easily have meetings. I've worked on both distributed and colocated projects at Google.
My personal preference, as a developer, is for remote work. But when I look at what the team actually accomplishes, the level of creativity in its solutions, and how quickly it accomplishes them, a colocated team almost always beats the distributed one. There's an energy that you can get when everyone is in the same room that's impossible to replicate when they're 1000s of miles apart.
The cases where I think remote work can do fine is when you have a simple tool or interface that needs implementing, or if you're just trying to optimize one number (eg. performance of a library). These are the same situations you'd use a contractor for.