This is neat, but movie-plot threat territory. Far more dangerous to actual security on iPhones is that airplane mode can be enabled from the lock-screen "Control Center" by default.

This basically means if somebody wants to steal your iPhone, the first thing they're gonna do is swipe up, turn on Airplane mode, and lock you out of using Find my iPhone to find or lock it. They can wait until they get to a chop shop or anything else, by which point they'll have their money, meaning that they'll still be incentivized to steal iPhones.

You can disable this 'feature' (control center from the lockscreen) in Settings, and I think we should spend way more time advertising that than worrying about whether it is possible for someone working in a lab to use latent prints to unlock your phone. In the time it's going to take them to do that, hopefully you can get somewhere to lock the phone online - but if the villain disables your ability to remotely brick the device, that's way more worrisome to me.