[astyanax]

“All” off? You mean the $1,000 monitor?
How many people actually need that (or would know the difference)?
But to compare apples to apples (no pun intended) Dell was offering a 27” 2560x1440 IPS Display for $719 last December. Prices will come down as more are produced. I have a 27” monitor (HP refurb) I picked up for $300 about a year ago just because it was such a great deal. I certainly don’t need it for my job, but I realize some people do.
i5 2400 is $150 @ microcenter.com.
Everything else we seem to agree on, although I’d use a different gpu and would never pay $100 for a case.
No one said it was a bad deal, just that for under $1k you could build a machine with a lot more hardware (i7 2600, 8 gig ram, 2 TB drive).

[rmlew]

I was comparing apples to apples, ie all in ones with notebook subsystems.
And I'd take an i-7 2500K over a vanilla 2600. Of course, i don't plan on building until the fall. Waiting for the Z68 motherboards and for USB3 headers to be properly implemented. I figue that NVidia will have relieves its 6xx series graphics cards by then too.

[Swordmaker]

In the interests of accuracy, the cost of medium size IPS LED LCD (wow, that’s a lot of alphabet soup) monitors has come down quite a bit in the last few months, with good quality ones in the 22”-23” class now being available in the $200-$250 range. Here’s a good example from ASUS:

http://www.compuplus.com/ASUS-ASUS-23-IPS-LED-1183977.html

Still, when you assemble top quality parts (and Apple pays extra to buy the top 10% of the production from their suppliers) into an all-in-one computer, with an excellent suite of software, you will be in the same price range as an iMac... and the iMac customer service will beat your assemblage in all ways... and will not have the various suppliers arguing about who is causing the problems: software or hardware. I assure you the parts you buy from the bargain companies are not from the top 10% of the production runs...