Convincing people who can't type to buy mechanical keyboards DOES serve a useful purpose -- it helps drive economy of scale, so the unwashed masses can subsidize our fun. It's one tiny step we can take to fight back against the Walmart race to the bottom that, left unchecked, will leave us with a dystropian market where a garbage keyboard that's mushy, breaks in 3 months, and drops 1% of keystrokes under the best circumstances costs $2 and sells by the hundreds of millions, and a mechanical keyboard is a one-off work of art by a master craftsman armed with a Makerbot and soldering iron, takes 4 days to build, and costs several hundred dollars.
The more we stand by and allow mass-market consumer gear to degenerate towards throw-away netbooks and under-powered tablets, the more prohibitively expensive it's going to become to buy anything that's even a TINY bit better, because the garbage wrings all the economies of scale out of the market and turns everything else into an expensive coture fringe luxury.
For a perfect example, look at laptops. They've obviously come WAY down in price compared to ten years ago. Ten years ago, a bottom-scraping low end laptop was around $800-1000 unless it was a $499 loss-leader on Black Friday... but for $500-1000 more, you got to enjoy a HUGE step up. The low end was expensive, but the non-exotic "one or two steps down from the highest of high end" wasn't a whole lot more, relatively speaking. Maybe double or triple the cost of the cheapest junk you could buy.
Compare that to now, where a crap netbook costs $300, but $800 might get you an equally-crap 15" with 1366x768 display and 1.8GHz AMD value-line CPU, and $1,300 barely makes a dent in a decent gamer notebook. The admission price & cover charge to get in the door has come way down, but the $500-1,000 you used to spend on your bar tab once inside doesn't buy you nearly as much extra fun as it used to. The gap between the low end and high end has widened considerably, and it's going to keep widening unless we do our best to fight it by continuing to encourage family members & neighbors to buy new computers and help subsidize our high-end fun.
The ultimate dystropian example would be a world where you can buy a crap netbook with ad-supported apps and version of Windows for $50, but buying a high-end laptop or desktop suitable for real content creation might set you back $5,000-10,000, plus another $500 if you're hellbent on buying a retail copy of Windows that gives YOU the admin rights instead of your ISP, cable company, employer, or some other entity, and another $250 for the UEFI bios subsidy unlock code if you want to install Linux. That's the direction we're heading in. We might not be able to stop it, but if we make half an effort, we might at least be able to delay its arrival by another half-century, so we'll either be dead, or old and satisfied with our old, open hardware, by the time our grandkids realize they're frogs in a pot of boiling water.
