KK has stated several times that the Ping thread is the messenger and disabling it is just burying your head in the sand,
Indeed disabling it in my experience does just delay a lot of issues - but there are many issues that are caused by high latency / lower bandwidth connections where the ping thread does seem to violate this, so I would love to see these tracked down and fixed rather than just disabling this given there seems to be a somewhat reliable environment where this happens now.
One reason you want the ping thread is if you are running a long running task that produces little logging will cause any intermediary firewalls to close connections as inactive.
/James