He's got some good points. Interesting in that I'm wondering if you could schedule the pull down of the stats to a development laptop, for local analysis, and what that would do to the performance of the thing if you accidentally went some time period without downloading the stats. Think sine wave - one day, lots and lots of collected stats, and the next day, nothing.
Shouldn't have any impact, but could be interesting to test.
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Indexing/73872/
