I just got done deploying Office 2010 to about 1,000 PCs with a startup script and I'm quite happy with it. My Customer doesn't have any entitlement to App-V (or any "application virtualization / streaming") functionality, so installs on the "bare metal" were my only option. Amazingly, we had only a handful of installation failures, and those PCs turned out to be machines that were hopelessly out of date re: Windows updates.
I ended up creating a simple mechanism to allow the user to "opt in" their computer for installation by way of a web page that back-ended to a script which modified group membership for the "Office 2010 Computers" Active Directory group. (This was a K-12 school setting, and I wanted to insure that users weren't surprised by booting up their computer in the morning and discovering an Office 2010 installation starting up.) We set a "line in the sand" date when their computers would have to be updated and most of the users complied happily.
Laptop computers with "iffy" wireless network connectivity and/or AC power were a bit of a challenge, but the opt-in mechanism and a note to users to let them know that they should choose a deployment time when they were connected to a wired port and AC power helped. I don't think we had any failures as a result of laptops with bad network connectivty or losing power, but we probably only have 50 laptops out of 1,000 PCs.
The opt-in script certainly wasn't the most secure thing in the world, but it was only necessary for a limited time and the worst ramification was that a user, I suppose, could opt-in somebody else's computer. (I'd post the code, but as with so many things, it was written as a work for hire for my Customer so I'd have to get their permission. I knocked it together in an evening, so you certainly could too.)