I must say Camshaft, I'm enjoying this tremendously!
I can't put aside comparisons completely, because I used to have a "laboratory" much like this until I was in my mid twenties. I didn't build stereos, but I tinkered with electronic keyboards and synthesizers, either altering or repairing them. At that point in my life I expected to be a performing musician and had very little interest in anything but writing music or messing with the equipment. Less than 4 years after this, I had sold off every single one of my keyboards and have stopped performing entirely. I have a single grand piano at which I spend an hour or so a week if I'm lucky.
I look at your ping-pong table and think about all that time I had. No wife. No house. No career. If I had a ping-pong table like yours today you'd see divorce papers on it along with all the other dismantled goodies!
Point being that guys who like to tinker with things and guys who like Bang & Olufsen are often the same people, just at different points in their lives. I feel I have to address this because it seems to undergird your original points, that B&O is for people who aren't as serious about their equipment as they are about their decor.
For all of my railing against Denon, I know perfectly well how they work and could hook one up with no trouble at all. I could also, I imagine, exploit nearly every feature they've packed into the box, I just don't want to. I feel that most of my clientele (almost 8 years worth now) have been more like me in this regard, and less the goofball who wouldn't know is B&W from his BWM.
It's now important that I be able to listen to music while I load the dishwasher or out on the patio while I entertain friends. It's important that on movie night, I don't have more than a button or two in between me and Fay Grim, and it's also important that my wife and my visitors not be confounded by my equipment.
Now to your point about the $400 receiver and the $100 remote. What got my dander up a bit here was not my love of Bang & Olufsen and their hit or miss user interfaces, but my expensive (and currently unused) education in design. My background is in human factors psychology, which deals with how we interact with our environments and the products that populate them. Now you brought up the MCP 6500 as an example of a beautiful controller, but one that was not necessarily the most intuitive. I would first direct your attention to the BeoSound 3200, which makes the MCP 6500 look like an iPod! I would say that David Lewis, to a greater extent than Jacob Jensen, focused less on interface design, than general operational principals and sculptural integrity. Who knows, though. Things were simpler during Jacob's tenure, so we don't know what he would have done.
Anyway, while the 9000 may have the best layout I've ever seen on an audio system, (with buttons that are clearly labeled and intuitively grouped, you are absolutely right that not everyone could walk up to a Bang & Olufsen system and operate it.
But here's where I'm still right. There is no virgin intuition when it comes to dealing with products. We work off a collection of cognitive models developed over a lifetime of expediting daily tasks. We do not actually see with fresh eyes when confronted with a new piece of equipment, but rather look for familiar cues and affordances to predict its operation.
That being said (and hopefully without too much dissent on this point) I would argue that the MCP 6500 is still a superior controller to the third party solution with the "watch tv" button. The reason being is this: If I were charged with designing a product such as an AV receiver, I would be responsible for not only creating a product (assuming this was a one man show!) that performed the required functions, but was also operable by the end user. Now I would have to choose carefully what features I assigned to the device, because I know that difficulty of use grows in proportion to breadth of capability. If I assigned it 8 possible functions, but made only 6 easily accessible by the end user, my superior would rightly inquire as to the purpose of the two inaccessible features. What more could I do than shrug my shoulders?
While the "watch tv" button may allow your mother to "watch tv," it also prevents her from any other operation. By establishing such different thresholds of perception (a customized label on a single button versus a field of anonymous buttons requiring additional orientation), you've made one task artificially easy and the rest artificially difficult.
Undoubtedly there are ways to change source, control each source, change speaker orientation, tweak dsp, etc. But some of those tasks are only operable by a specialist.
I would argue that the MCP 6500 would be a better long term solution in that it may have a slightly steeper learning curve than a "watch tv" button, but with a bit of orientation can lead to a more comprehensive and satisfying operation a the system.
In summation, I'm happy to agree that Bang & Olufsen is not for everyone (in fact it's a point of pride) but to think that our customers are any less sophisticated than an Onkyo user or that our products are somehow incomplete because they don't function like the Onkyo is patently ridiculous. They are simply different and built expertly for a client with an entire different set of interests and requirements. After all, how could a lack 120hz refresh on a BeoVision 7 really be a crucial issue when neither myself nor my clients care about it?
Your turn.
There is scarcely anything in this world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey. - John Ruskin