I don't know if it's anyone else's motivation, but developers should have machines that approximate the machine of their software's customer base. Otherwise what runs OK on a developer machine can be painful to use out in the field.
The remote debugging setup process isn't very slick, but it doesn't take long to figure out, and with a bit of folder-sharing you can keep all the files on your work PC so that it's all nice and convenient. I did this for quite a while, working on Windows, and it worked well. I don't recall any significant problems with it.
If cost is what's preventing you getting a nice PC, then that's one thing, but the issue is just ensuring that slow code doesn't go unnoticed, this approach will probably keep you/your programmers happier...
Right now I write code for a 32-CPU 64GB RAM 300MB/s machine, should I request one exactly like it for myself? And it's not even a hardware issue - the OS, DB and middleware licenses to use on that HW cost >$1M.
If you write Java code, you need 2GB for the IDE on a large project.
But then, many people don't write software to run on customers machines.