I would prefer my (probably expensive) machine to kind of "know" what it's physical limits are and guarantee that executed commands adhere to them.
The assumption that there is a cam workstation, and that it's in an office building, is certainly not one i would make. I wouldn't also say "will never make much sense".
You seem to have some particular set of users in mind for which you believe it wouldn't make sense. Okay - i'm not sure that changes that there are plenty of sets of users for which it will?
I even gave you examples of high end wood machines that have CAM directly integrated. There are many.
(They can also be programmed offline, but)
As for "knowing" the physical limits.
That's not actually possible since it there is no way to self-configure it even if everything did talk to each other. They don't know their own physical orientations (and it would be very expensive/hard to do that, and you'd still be guessing in the end)
Most of the non-safety/accessory programming is essentially explaining enough of the physical orientation and placement of things to the motion control that it can do something.
CAM workstation (running some "generic" CAM package with machine specific configuration) in some office building was the precondition, in that case it will never make much sense to control a machine's servos from that workstation, in my opinion.
Integrating the CAM within the machine itself is something else, and yes, stuff like that existed for very long time, but that is something completely different IMHO.
The machine controller "knows" the physical limits because somebody configured it (and "locked" it). It would be hard to guarantee the integrity of this configuration if you put it on an arbitrary workstation to run CAM and machine control.
Wait, so even the really high-end gear in high-end names like DMG Mori don't use something like millimeter radar, ultrasound or machine vision to confirm that real-world orientations at least correspond to within a few orders magnitude accuracy of what is expected? If so, then mad props to you machining guys working with such expensive kit without continuous closed loop monitoring conditions; you re-e-a-a-ally like to live on the wild side.