That's a very real pain when only one or two people are remote. I spent the last five years in that environment and definitely missed out on a lot of relevant discussions.

I'm now leading a team which is about 50% remote, with the remaining people working from home a few days a week, and it makes a huge difference. Discussions naturally occur on Slack, often spinning out into a few people jumping into a Hangouts call. For people in the office we've got the meeting room set up for video conferencing which makes it practical to have mixed local/remote meetings without the half hour of trying to get things set up.

Overall I'm a big fan, and hopeful that we can make people working remote even smoother as time goes on.