I actually work in a completely remote team, in the sense that everyone works remotely (about 50 people). So there is no hierarchy of remote people being second-class team members, as you seem to be describing.

For minute-by-minute chats we use IRC, and that works well. For longer conversations, mailing lists. And we have twice weekly video conferences, and twice yearly physical meet ups.

This works well. I suspect it wouldn't work well if half the people were sitting in a room together and had conversations that were not accessible to the remote workers.