Well, I've been the remote co-founder in more than a handful of ventures and it's worked for me. A few points in favor of this structure:
1) The most important is that you might be able to attract some candidates that would not otherwise consider your endeavor. Not sure what your candidate pool looks like but if you're not seeing the types of co-founders you'd like to see this might broaden your appeal.
2) If you're a hands-on technical guy having some focused time where you can actually get stuff done, as opposed to sitting around the whiteboard with your beer ; ), might actually accelerate things (not that beers and whiteboards don't have their place). It just depends on whether you have a focused objective, or if you're still casting about defining things. Certainly there are times when boots on the ground are critical (I spent 5 months in our factory last year launching our products).
3) There are numerous ways to cooperate, a ton of tools from communication to management. The dreaded email thread is not relegated to remote operation, having worked onsite and remotely I don't find there to be significantly less emails working onsite, and the same issues arise.
4) It's all about the people. Hiring the right team is key. My team issues throughout my career have mostly been with the team members themselves not being the right fit for the job than where they were located.
5) Business today is global. Even if your team is local, you'll find that your supply chain, business partners, customers, etc... are not. So, having a solid means of working with them remotely serves you in those relationships as well. It's rare to find an endeavor these days that's truly local and can do business face-to-face.
Having said all that, in order to make that work I think you need to find the right people and put appropriate systems in place to make that relationship work successfully.
All the best.