I am surprised by this. It would be so much more efficient to concentrate on building technology that makes working with people around the world as seamless as working with them in the same office.
I can see this argument work when the team is like 4-5 people, but the moment you are at 15 and above, it all breaks.
Additionally you would need to be able to adjust the focal range of your webcam, and it would need to be adjustable enough to pick out fine features. You might also need it to be a high-speed camera.
I don't know a lot of people whose devices have those capabilities. In that case, even a 3am videoconference is nowhere near as good as being in the same room. I've had to work with people under those conditions, and it's very difficult to convey anything other than a course of action.
Maybe 33-50% of the nonverbal communication involved in technical communication is you pointing something out to your colleague, and while it's certainly possible to do that over email using pictures, they will never have as complete a picture as you. Some things you need to see with your own eyes to understand.
If the programmer on the other side of the world is so much better than what you can find locally, surely it would be worth the investment for your company to buy high speed cameras, or remote probes, or whatever else, to make this sort of teleconferencing possible.
Laparoscopic surgeons manipulate human flesh by looking at a screen! The first remote robotic surgery happened 13 years ago!(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery#The_Lindbergh_Op...) I understand that medical equipment is incredibly expensive, but you are not saving lives, so your equipment should be cheaper in an appropriate manner. It seems to me that when scaled out, that solution would be cheaper, and would promote better technological progress in the long run, than the upheaval required to import all the world's greatest programmers into the US.
We don't need to physically touch each other, but occupying the same "space" has a demonstrable increase in productivity and efficiency. Fortunately that "face time" I think can be mostly resolved in a immersive virtual environment.
You also get a lot of other great benefits when working in a virtual environment (why limit yourself to one 24" screen...). For me it's a matter of when, not if knowledge workers spend most of their working day in a VR environment.