Well, I meant you can use these tools to gain access to the remote machine to do some real damage. Nmap and friends are usually for finding running services, list of open ports, knock on a few doors (run some queries?) etc... and if someone were to gain access to a machine this way, filling up their hard drive may not be on their list of priorities. Unless incrimination was the intention.
Really. I assumed you were talking about some nmap-based attack I hadn't heard of. That maybe fills the target's HD with log files or something. Wondered whether that would work cross-platform on any device, like this attack. Wondered whether it could be pulled off by an idiot with a grudge, like this attack. Or whether targeting someone by IP isn't in fact actually harder than being able to do it by getting someone to click on any link, anywhere.
But yes, indeed, if the machine's already vulnerable to something else, then that is possibly much worse.
I don't think this is as easy or as common as you think it is. For one, almost every computer is behind a firewall these days and remote vulnerabilities for common services aren't anywhere near as common as they used to be.
