the thing i suspect is those chaps are lazy arse only aim at clueless governments or big companies who care less about paying premium for support. in the sense that...
Or possibly you don't know what the shit you are talking about and are just ranting?
Even making a simple application with minimal hardware dependencies work across every possible PC hardware and software is a nightmare, as anyone who has worked in professional software development can attest to. You have to budget a lot of money for testing on many configurations, money for providing customer support for the configurations you missed, and development resources to make it work everywhere. This increases costs to your customers a lot. You do it anyway because you have no choice. When you are making a turn-key system including hardware and software, if at all possible you want to target only certain approved configurations. Whether you do this by a list of approved hardware or systems and a steadfast refusal to provide any customer support to people not using the approved devices, by only selling your software with a service contract that includes on-site installation, or by shipping preconfigured hardware to the customer depends on how big your market is, what your software does, and how many units you sell.
For example, while any PC can play sound and transfer files over the internet, getting reliable, low-latency sound capture and network streaming is highly dependent on the driver and configuration. If your network card stalls for 100 ms every 30s, you will never notice it while web browsing, but it will totally screw up audio streaming at least if you care about latency and don't just use huge buffers. Sound capture is also generally less advanced than playback on consumer sound cards, both from the hardware and driver front. Look at the huge amounts of time FPS gamers spend tweaking their system settings to optimize their ping time -- with no guarantee that it won't make other applications perform worse. It is far cheaper to have a guy who actually knows what he is doing tweak a single system and then clone it for your customers than to provide tech support to every customer to tweak their own $1000 PC.
I have no idea if this companies products are well designed or a good value and I don't really care. I am just saying that the people ranting here about it who have no idea about the reality of professional software development should give them the benefit of the doubt. For software with a small market and requiring close integration with hardware this is a relatively standard practice and may very well be the most cost effective route.