Hate to undermine your argument, but your own mom would love it if you would remotely administer her machine in this way, so I think that there is a market, the question is "how big" and "how hard" (hrm, that sounds wrong).

David, the number one issue I see is dealing with the huge variety in hardware configurations.  The second issue being how to deal with hardware failures and network failures.  The bad news is that in both circumstances you would have no control and no special access to deal with them.  In my opinion that's a deal killer.