One of the downsides I've come accross is the bus pirates USB connection can be flaky at times, this manifests itself with a Kernel deadlock on the client system (whole machine freezes) I've not managed to obtain any debug information as the only way to resolve the situation is with a hard reboot.

The USB Tiny does not suffer the same issue. The work around is to simply access the Bus Pirate serial port over SSH or using the previous serial2tcp tool for the bus pirate and leaving this work around for the USBTiny.