I take exception to you casting them as having a reasonable reputation for reliability. In my experience it's a gamble for reliability, if you lose expect poor support, long repair times, and if it's out of warranty the repairs are always more than the cost of the device.
You gamble when buying any product. No one has a 100% success rate. In my personal experience over a decade of using Asus products, I've not seen a 100% success rate, but my only one failure was recently and they took care of me.
Dell might send a technician to you, but that doesn't mean the quality is any better. Friend of mine fairly recently had his Alienware laptop "repaired" which ended with Dell completely replacing it because the technician effectively destroyed his new laptop. Ordered, received it months later, was defective out of the box, technician destroyed it, had to wait even more months for a replacement, tried to send him an inferior replacement in the process.
None of them are without faults. But I've had a lot of success with Asus.
