survival of the fittest, economy will find its balance, naturally, sentimentally or forcefully. scope vendors' point of view will be different from consumers esp tightly budget consumers like many here. and then there are another consumers with thick pocket and after sale service as a priority. i have a brand name equipment in another arena, and then i have another cheap china brand in this arena, both went to repair station at different point in time. i can tell my experience with cheap china brand is much better (the other is being a japanese brand with local repair service available) but that is my personal experience in this tiny country, others may be totally upside down.
one sad truth i figured out from my own "speculation" (i maybe mistaken i'm not an economist) a "well educated" companies will factor in the "possible profit" that can be gained by their target users in their products/services pricing. more profit = more expensive equipments/services even though the same or simpler complexity compared to equipments aimed at low profit users. this is especially true in softwares, and to some extend in hardwares too. so in bad analogy is like company A selling products to company B at expensive rate by squeezing the effort (profit) from company B at some proportion, its sounds bad but its my thought as a user. this may also has something to do with the company A liabilities, bigger higher end company = bigger liabilities. but this will put low margin users out of the league. so cheap china is like a savior to these people, and a big savings to other businesses, schools and universities. i think the market demand will be mainly decided by market segments at the bottom of the "food" chain (not the middle man company B) and i believe big companies on top of the chain knew about this already.
of course we don't make blind decision just based on free upgrade hype, in the end its going to be how much bang per buck it will be (price per feature) for us, but maybe not so for thick pocketed costumers as long as the tool does the job and 5 stars aftersale service. i think DS1054Z is still bang per buck even without the free upgrade. but i think not so today since some contenders already want to do tug war game with rigol for quite sometime now (more features but no free upgrade) but yet there are people tried hard here to get the equally BW upgrade on other brand no matter how nasty it will look like (warranty void guaranteed). this tug war will be quite difficult to enter for "big liabilities" companies so they have to find another targets or strategies and i think both big and small company will have their market segment. higher end scope like GHz bandwidth is not yet in reach of hobbiests community even from rigol so... finger crossed. my 2cents.