Home invasion suspects caught with iPhone's help

I think this feature is great but I think it needs to be password protected. I mean if the person that took your phone is familiar with iphones then they can just go turn off the find me iphone feature. So then it is pointless

Find My iPhone came in handy a few weeks ago when my wife's phone was lifted from her bag at the gym. I did a screen capture of the location from my iPhone, emailed it to the gym manager and she shared with the police. Unfortunately it turned out to be an apartment complex so it was impossible to figure out who had the phone. In the meantime I remotely locked it down and sent a message that asked the thief to return the phone to the gym "no questions asked". Amazingly it showed up at the gym about 30 minutes later. i guess the thief had a conscience after all.

I recently recovered my wife's iphone 4 at Orlando International Airport with the help of Find My iPhone. After her flight left I could see the phone moving around the Delta terminal. A two hour search, with the assistance of Delta baggage personnel, tracked the phone down to one of the aircraft cleaners who found it, and 'hadn't had a chance to turn it in'. :)

@JAG: While I'm delighted you recovered your phone (twice), I have some advice for you that—if you follow it—will make your phone even more secure:

Move.

While wiping the phone is a great security feature, proceed with caution if you still think you want to try tracking it by GPS. Wiping will cause you to lose the ability to continue tracking. This should be a last resort after you've decided to give up the hunt.

I used Find My iPhone twice to recover the same phone. Yes, it was stolen twice. On each occasion the local police seemed a little perplexed how I was able to track the phone to specific house. Got the phone back within a couple of hours each time. To be most effective in this, you have to keep from locking or wiping your phone while the thief has it, at least initially. If you lock it, they may turn it off, or get frustrated and start calling their friends asking if they know how to break the password lock. The best solution is to begin looking/tracking the phone as soon after the theft as possible. Get the police involved, and have them proceed with the recovery. As I said...this worked great for me, TWICE.

I've been a happy user of Orbicule's Undercover product for my Mac's since long before the Find My iPhone/Mac apps were available. It's very lightweight and does much the same thing as Find My Mac but has a few other bells & whistles that I like. If you report your Mac stolen it can not only start tracking it but will take both screenshots of the Mac and photos from the iSight camera and send them to you so you can see who is using it. Orbicule also apparently tracks the IP addresses of known repair shops, etc. and will pop up an "I've been stolen" message if the Mac reports its at one of those locations. They've got a lot of interesting success stories written up on their company blog.

Lost my phone last week - Find my iPhone failed me, because the phone was "offline". Presumably this means the phone was turned off. After a couple hours I received notification that my Remote Wipe was successfully triggered (I guess they turned it on). After the wipe I was no longer able to locate my device...
I was a little disappointed in the lack of clarity in what "remote wipe" means, I expected I'd still be able to locate (at the very least) the last known location of my phone... But, nevertheless I was grateful it was there as it protected my privacy when it mattered.
One other note, I heard some Android devices have the ability to turn on the device, and activate it's GPS remotely. I don't know whether there's much truth to this but It could've been useful to me.