When is someone going to develop a quality desktop 3D printer? I know I would be willing to pay many times the price of a Makerbot for a proper printer.
I think you can get a "real" desktop 3D printer for about $5K these days. But the consumer build-it-yourself designs are doing reasonably well, and actually give very, very good results - the catch is you have to be willing to put a lot of time in.
I guess I would also note that these guys are all kind of headed in the direction of competing with the "real" desktop 3D printers, but yeah, they won't be there for a while. I wrote some further thoughts here: http://justindunham.net/2011/08/where-is-open-source-3d-prin...
The RepRap Project is an initiative aimed at creating a largely self-replicating machine which can be used for rapid prototyping and manufacturing: http://www.reddit.com/r/reprap
Both are different projects, but relate to 3D printing.