Bob is right on it here. When I embarked on the "quest to climb Mount MOTU" some time back, I did not have a computer with the form factor I needed to handle the interface card. The options there are to upgrade or buy new. If you buy new, you take what "they" give you. If you don't have the experience and skills to upgrade, you have no other option. In my case, I bought a motherboard, CPU and RAM and put it in the existing case. I also bartered for a 1tb hard drive, cloned my existing 60gb drive to the 1tb, and off I went, with a new motherboard that had the PCIe slot I needed for the MOTU interface card.

What I did for $110 dollars and a well executed barter would have cost someone $300 at a computer shop. And when you hit the $300 mark, you are only $50-100 from a new off the shelf model, and most people hear the call of the "new" and go that way. They they get a minimum amount of RAM, onboard video that shares that minimum amount of RAM, lower end CPUs.... Really is a vicious cycle.