I think the description of it as epic refers to the amount and nature of the damage done, not the technical accomplishment. We expect that someone might be able to hack our online accounts, but that they could hack our online accounts and then use that to reach into our homes to nuke data off of our hard drives is different.
Perhaps Apple need to reword their warning message[1] to scare people away from enabling it. The only indication that user is going to enable Remote Wipe is a little "erase a lost Mac" text, which I guess most people will just ignore it.