What I hate worse than DOAs is inconsistent hardware. I've gotten orders with different video cards, network adapters and even motherboards within the same shipment for the same exact hardware ordered. They were all within spec of the ordered hardware, so they could ship it. We built an image off of one and it started failing on random machines when pushed out. Yep, driver problems. Kind of makes it hard to do a standard image.
Meanwhile, OS X knows all of its hardware, and the enterprise utilities will make valid images specificially for those machines, correct drivers and all.
Agreed. Buy mediocre but solid devices, prepackage them, don't allow modifications, ...
It has it's niche in the marketplace.