For a third of that price, you can get a box that's also got a built-in ethernet switch and two WiFi interfaces. You're paying a ton for software convenience.
What, a Raspberry Pi (which for that price doesn't have ethernet, wifi or a case for that matter), and on which I'll have to wait 5 minutes before the OCR is done that my central server takes 10 seconds to do; and which requires Windows 10 which didn't even exist when I first got my setup 2-3 years ago?
Hell no. Just get any wireless router from the past 3-4 years and you've got USB and fast networking on a cheap box, and you can install a print server or usbip server depending on your preferences. That $150 box is probably even using the same 800MHz MIPS SoC as the $50 routers.
(And what are you getting at with implying that using a RasPi instead of a turnkey solution would cause Windows-related trouble or require doing the heavy processing somewhere else than your current setup?)
I'm really not sure where you're getting your specs from, but all Raspberry Pi's are a fraction of that price, come with ethernet, and don't require Windows 10. Plus the newer RPi's are quad-core ARM with 1GB RAM, which I'd wager is more than your device comes with.
I'm not trying to dismiss your device though. I do believe that it works well. But as another commenter stated, your device is priced up because of the software convenience rather than being a "bargain" in terms of hardware specifications.
Being able to pdfgrep through years of documents has been a massive time-saver for me. My ix500 paid for itself in time saved and then some.
Although, my setup is less than ideal since the ix500 does not play nicely with linux. I scan to a shared folder on my Linux Desktop from Windows 7 running in VirtualBox.