I agree. It takes about 10 min to warm up the house, no problem.

Remote access is so I can turn it down remotely because I forgot to when I left :-)

That depends on the kind of heating you have on the house. Air vent heating takes 10 minutes. Radiators take some 40 minutes. Underfloor heating takes about 90 minutes.

Remote control does make sense for some, not all cases.

I'm actually looking for one for my shop, which has a longer heat-up time

For home, I agree that the programmable ones are ok, although they fall down when we travel for more than a week -- we have to either run it an unnecessary day, or arrive to an extra-cold house, so if there was a good one, it'd still be handy there.