Well when I say big box, I mean big box per dev but I get your point.
The message I'm getting from folks is that if you do contract/client work, you want everything local for many reasons.
In my case, I work for a Large Software Company so my scenario is more constrained.
And being reliant on connectivity to a "big box" to simply get your work done is suboptimal. Also, how big of box do you need when you've got hundreds if not thousands of devs? Much easier (and cheaper, since there's no upkeep) to throw another 16GB of memory inside every developer's system.