Reading the patch thread the remote kill is needed if someone confiscates the mining units or steals em.
Seems a bit overkill though but in the name of coin security someone would appreciate the feature and phone home does the job.

We will continue the development of this feature to provide a technical protection for mining rig owners to host their miners in remote locations. We will add a switch to this feature, and this switch will be closed by default.

As long as someone bothers to read the code the feature sounds decent enough sum up steal my miner I brick it lol, kind of sounds like a douche thing a reseller could do to someone depending on how it is used though.