Yes, I'm testing the "Find my iPhone" feature and it works how you expect. I've read some stories about spanish police using the geolocation data of stolen smartphones to help recover them.

I still didn't come up with an answer to "What happens if someone brings the iPad back to their country?". Although I could locate it I probably couldn't recover it :-\

The only way is having a deposit from the credit card of the customer, but I don't like to retain some hundred bucks of someone who is on their holidays.