Couple additional points. In my experience a safe boot disables airport/wireless. So if this is how the remote mac connects, it will no longer be accessible. If you need/wish to reset this nvram variable while at the machine without using terminal, I believe a zap of the pram will do the trick.

Interesting point about airport. From my experience all of the macbook and macbook pro laptops we have will boot up with airport working. I seem to remember some iBooks being a bit problematical, but we don't have any in the network any more.

Reading some of the other comments, I like the idea of saving the results of fsck (the command that's one typo away from being rude) for later analysis.

I'm a little surprised that there isn't a more elegant way of doing this in ARD, including a way of capturing a log of the results.