You're not wrong, but for an awful lot of combinations of hardware and remote locations, it's reasonable to ship gear as needed. I do firmware work remotely, and think of occasional fast shipping (or more rarely, work trips) as a cost of doing business.
Again, typically not easy if you are doing industrial hardware that weighs 100 pounds, has fragile components, still in a phase where various hardware components need to be regularly tweaked or replaced by their respective experts on the team, needs to be on-site to function at all, and depends on other infrastructure.
If you're doing consumer hardware, different story.
