Oh, I don't doubt that you can get more bang for your buck in China. However, all that capability is coming with the tradeoff being overall quality. You're going to experience more downtime due to random failures like bad solder joints, crimped cables, burned-out motors, and flaky (read: improperly grounded) solid-state electronics.
In your case, you love to tinker with your equipment and I have no doubt that in a month or two with Chinese equipment, you'll have it upgraded, altered and singing like a dream.
A complete novice who's just starting off with a print shop, on the other hand, would be pissed off and up to his eyeballs in debt because nothing he bought was working.
A lot of it comes with having a manufacturer willing to stand by their product for years. Chinese companies come and go so fast, with super-high employee turnover, that a product they launch today might be unsupported in a year or two. You'll still be able to get equivalent components in five years for most of it, but custom-designed components such as Epson head driver boards will be hard to come by without reverse-engineering (and since most of the Chinese logic is done in software, keyed to a security dongle, what happens when the dongle breaks 3 years down and the manufacturer has moved on?)
I know they're making great strides forward on this stuff -- and most of what I'm saying today will probably be fixed in a few years' time -- but it's always hit and miss over there.
In my case, the print shop I'm at doesn't go for the fast, cheap market. We strive for the best quality possible, so we need machines that will consistently produce high quality output, at high enough speeds to allow a reasonable turnaround, consistently. We can't really afford to have a machine that might barf on one out of every six boards it runs (I've seen Taiwanese-designed printers that do worse than that). Or a machine that goes down for days on end while we wait for parts; or a manufacturer that ships the wrong parts, with the wrong shipping method.
Now obviously it helps if you have multiple machines, but if all the redundant machines suffer from the same design flaws, it's no help -- or if you have to rob parts from one to fix another, and then run out of parts before new ones come in...
As far as production on the $100k vs 3x $30k machines, the $100k machine can get about 500 sq.ft/hr in production; the $30k machines can probably manage 180 sq.ft/hr on a good day at 4 passes. In 4x8 boards, that means that the $100k machine is spitting out about 14-15 boards per hour, while each of the $30k machines is doing 4-5 boards per hour. So again, it's kind of a wash -- until you factor in extra operators for the additional machines. From a labor perspective, it costs about the same to run 1 fast machine around the clock with 3 shifts as it does running 3 slow machines for 1 shift. If you have really good operators, they can probably keep track of two machines easily, go up to 3 and throughput is going to drop a little whenever the machines go out of sync.
