RDP for wide Internet use is a sketchy choice, IMHO. Configuration is a pain, particularly if you live in DHCP land like most home users. It doesn't perform very well in that environment from my experience either.

IME RDP performance is fine these days if you've got even a halfway decent upstream connection-- the newer clients and servers are much better about tolerating low bandwidth/high latency connections than they used to be (they finally ditched the naive "forward the GDI calls" approach they used to take and do lossy compression much like VNC now).

I don't expose it to the internet, though. Only thing on my home network that is exposed directly to the internet is an SSH gateway (using public key auth, passwords disabled); from there, I can forward SSH or VNC or whatever I need access to.

RDP at home is certainly difficult, but I have to disagree on the performance bit. In fact, RDP is probably by far the best such protocol in use right now.