"It's great that they're cheap, but they're not going to last very long either."
How long do they need to last, seriously? Hip consumers tire of electronics and want new ones long before the old ones wear out, and the zillions of un-hip PC users still hobbling along on Win '95 systems--that's TEN YEARS ago!--give lie to your theory that cheap plastic PC's die early deaths.
If my memory serves, those win95 systems averaged around $1,000 each, excluding monitors.
Now you can get something for $500 with a monitor and printer thrown in.
Cheap now is far cheaper than it was then.
D