Really? How then should those guys have secured a backup made in their hotel room before flying home: make a backup onto a thumbdrive/DVD/whatever and FedEx'ed it home? Its possible but a real hassle and very likely to be skipped. Online backup was an excellent option in this case.
Connect to the corporate vpn and backup that way. If I would take my company owned laptop and backup to some non company owned service I'd be fired. Very few companies will allow anything like that and when they do its only trough company approved sites where they have the proper legal documents in place.
The example would only work for a small home office, not any larger business.
That example is the reason why I've recieved a dozen e-mails over the lats couple weeks from various companies letting me know that my e-mail address has been stolen from a marketing company called epsilon. When you send your date off to a third party you loose control.