One of the inherent problems with tactile feedback over a distance is the speed of light. The last haptic device I used received feedback from a computer every ms. Too much latency kills the experience for long distance tactile communication. How far could you reasonably "reach out and touch" someone? I'd guess maybe a hundred or few hundred miles.
As a general rule, the human brain doesn't notice any delay of less that 100ms. Anything less than that is "instantaneous".
Light takes 1.6ms to travel 300 miles, or 3.2ms for a round-trip, which is well below that threshold. To get up to a 100ms round-trip, the two parties would have to be 0.05 light-seconds apart, or just shy of 15000km (9314 miles).
That's plenty to get you North America, Europe and East Asia, but unfortunately Australia is a bit far from North America or Europe.
Obviously, that's assuming the signals are transferred at the speed of light with no other sources of latency, which is an ideal. But still, it's a far cry from "a hundred or few hundred miles".
