@smerf
Don't worry too much about your A4000 - whatever's wrong with it it'll be repairable somehow. My A1500 went the way of the dodo the other day too... switched all the chips round and traced it to a faulty Kickstart ROM, so it looks like it just wanted to be upgraded to 3.1 after all.
You have to understand, though, that we're limited in CPU speed because the new machines like the SAM are using embedded CPUs, not desktop ones, and they're intrinsically slower... but don't just look at the numbers. The point is you can do a lot with 1.1GHz, it's just that Windows, MacOS and even Linux these days bog down their CPUs in a way that AmigaOS doesn't.
In other words, it may be 1.1GHz, but generally it'll feel faster than a 4-core 3GHz CPU running Windows. Obviously it won't be as fast for computation and data encoding, but for general usage it'll feel very responsive indeed.
When you bought your A1000, did it have tons of software for it? No, it didn't. You bought it presumably because it was something new, something different and exciting. Something you could enjoy playing with, which was still useful.
All of that applies to modern Amiga machines. So we're 10 years behind in pricing terms... that's life I'm afraid. If you want something different, you need to pay for it. If you want the mass produced tat, you get it cheap.
Trust me: ACube, AmigaKit et al don't make a massive profit margin on these things. They're not stupid. If they have such a high list price, it's because that's how expensive they are. Plus don't forget your A1000 will have been a lot pricier than a Sam 460 system; the only difference is these days you can get faster machines for less, but as none of them are PPC based, they can't be compared.
