You are correct at today's prices. My guess is that as prices drop under $2500/machine and $10/PCB and safety issues are resolved PnP will become more popular.

You are correct at today's prices. My guess is that as prices drop under $2500/machine and $10/PCB and safety issues are resolved PnP will become more popular. There's a lot of need for repeatable, low rate production. A PnP is kind of like Vagrant/Puppet/Chef for hardware. Instead of manually building the board each time, use a configuration managed automated build.