I personally enjoy the ability, I hate exploration so It's nice to know about where everything is, and it's an awful suprise to appear in a home system and have a major attack fleet blown out of the sky
ahh good times.
The ability is an advantage primaraly to colonization but in general combat it's useless because the target empire often has a little planet out of the way somewhere preventing you from killing them off...
It doesn't offer that much of an advantage...