Unless it's primarily an HMI and logic application with maybe a need for less than 10 I/O or something, I've never got the idea behind these. Who wants to run 100 wires to the door?
@deep6ixed: Many of Horner's units will talk to remote I/O (some are even remote-only), so you can put the I/O on the backplane, and expand it, if you like Horner's programming paradigm. The ones I'm thinking of even talk Modbus/TCP, so you can use generic distributed I/O like Terminator or ProtosX, or 50 other distributed I/O systems.