Precedent isn't great
Yep - ASUS products offer great specs for the $ in many cases. I bought a high spec gaming laptop (G73JH) 18 months ago for hundreds less than comparable offerings. The issue being the minor but irritating bugs that never quite get ironed out. Trawling through forum posts for 'unofficial' (ie unsupported except on the forum thread) fixes from one of their reps gets tiring.
Example of the sequence 'out of the factory' issues to be dealt with:
- Keyboard missing every 20th stroke due to hardware conflict
- total freezeup when using newer video drivers, requiring flashing of bios and video card bios
- keyboard lights not working after said update, requiring more f'n about to resolve
- touchpad working erratically or refusing to work at all, no good fix for that one yet
Kill me now! I was very close to buying the prime, but seeing this again makes me realise I was stupid last time when some of the early users reported the above, and I thought 'ah, they'll fix those!'