I had Fixed Point Wireless (Sprint Broadband) at my old house, and the latency with even that gave a lot of trouble using the VPN to work. The throughput could be staggering, I'd seen it hit 4mbps, but the latency was so bad it almost wasn't worth it. Ping times averaged around 700ms and frequently topped 1 full second vs an average of about 90ms on my DSL circuit. I'd image the satellite would be even worse because the packet has to travel to AND from the satellite before it reaches fiber or copper, whereas the FPW only needs to travel to the tower.

Also, I know someone in a remote area of Wyoming who used satellite for awhile and eventually got rid of it to go back to dialup. She telecommutes and latency turned out to be more of an issue than throughput or total bandwidth for her.