Agreed.
I tend to look suspiciously at any hardware targeted explicitly for gamers. Video cards advertised for gamers are all-too-often either "Let's fool the customer by saying that a FX5200 is the ideal gaming card" or "a $450 card that's only a little better than a $175 card in 95% of games". I didn't like the whole "I'll slap my name on EVERY lousy piece of hardware with a red LED" Fata1ity thing, and there are a huge stack of "gaming" keyboards and mice which are of mediocre quality, but very pretty.
In a way, I'd expect the gaming community to almost be a closed, word-of-mouth thing, and brands that explicitly attempt to target them will always feel "fake"
However, there are a wide array of other reasons to get a good keyboard. Now, if only most "gaming" keyboards fit the definition.
There are only three products where the "gamer" term actually fits.
The first one is video cards. Yes nVidia is playing most people for fools and just renaming cards to make them sound like a newer product. Yes they seriously overcharge for the top of the line models even though a card that's half the price is still 85% as fast. But the truth of the matter is that there are only two types of video cards: Workstation cards and Gaming cards. Workstation cards are tuned for AA, a lossless z-buffer, two-sided lighting, and other stuff that is important to CAD and Rendering programs. Gaming cards concentrate on almost nothing but their texture fillrate. This is why workstation cards don't do so well in games and vice versa. And therefore, "gaming GFX card" is not just marketing.
The second one is sound cards. Simply put, if it has EAX then it's a gamer card. If it doesn't then it's not. Of course that doesn't mean that its sound quality is as good as some other non-EAX cards, but it does perform 3D sound processing in video games that others don't. I don't find it necessary in the least bit, a lot of games don't support it anymore in Vista, and you need 5.1 or 7.1 speakers to hear it's effects properly, but it's still
not just marketing.
The third one is mice. Most hardcore FPS gamers use low sensitivity settings on their mouse - this means that they have to move the mouse very fast and over large distances on their mousepad to move around. 80%-90% of standard mice can't handle that kind of acceleration and speed (just try to get a cheap-o mouse and move it as fast as you can on a mousepad, see what happens to the cursor). So the term "gaming mouse" points to those mice that can (some better than others). Also, virtually all mice have some sort of auto-leveling feature built in - where if you want to draw a straight line across the screen it helps out by ignoring any minor vertical movements. Gaming mice
never do that. So instead of gamers going around and testing out every mouse on the market the companies made it easier by pointing out which mice are (supposedly) guaranteed to fit these two gaming criteria.
But everything else is nothing but a scam and abuse of the market. Gaming keyboard, gaming headset, gaming speakers, gaming mousepad, gaming monitor, gaming computer case....really, wtf is a computer case going to do for your gaming?