Port forwarding from a single machine is something that may be done for the home. For work you would normally always use VPN, and any directly accessible SSH computers would be put on a demilitarized zone, outside the proper firewall.

For my own setup I would use VPN also for a home network, it's easy enough to configure and it's also much more convenient - the VPN will give you access to lots more than just remote login. When using only SSH you would have to set up tunneling for everything that's not login.

As for security - I can only agree, why should SSH be more secure than OpenVPN? I'm not aware of any well-known security problem with OpenVPN (unlike the MS implementation of PPTP, for example).