Re: I'm unsurprised
"Staff purchase equipment that actually meets their needs"
In what respect?
Personal? That's fine,if you only use your own equipment for personal use, then of course you should be allowed to do and use what you want, it's no concern of your employer.
If, on the other hand, you intend to use you own kit to do work which involves your employer's data, time and other resources such as broadband charges, then you must be able to demonstrate that what you are doing is safe and under the control of your company. After all, it is their money you are spending. And if that means that the IT department sets standards that must be met, then so be it. Or would you really like to assume the entire responsibility, i.e. the cost of when something goes wrong, like data accidentally deleted or that vital piece of future planning that's stolen along with your tablet and the putting it right.
I always used to tell managers, when they complained about the cost of a visit from Desktop Support, to look on it as an insurance policy. "If you get something wrong and we have to fix it, then you'll pick up the entire bill, if we make a mistake and it has to be fixed then we pay, not you."
So decide, do you want that responsibility?
If I had to make the decision of whether to allow BYOD into a company I was running, I would first have to be assured that the costs to the company did not outweigh the increase in productivity and that includes risks to the integrity of the company's data and infrastructure, increased support costs and so on.