Makerbot is in a tough spot. They lost points with people when they announced closing off of some of their work vs remaining open source. And so customers thought they might (if they are paying premium for consumer level printing anyway) to go with Ultimaker which retained premium build quality and remained open. And month after month, other companies keep bringing printers out to compete.

Microcenter is carrying Makerbot but also much lower priced generic 3D printers I think which are house branded. Dremel has a very nice 3D printer for a lot less than Makerbot and apparently has pretty good tech support too.

In regards to competing with China though, it's important to know that the products from China are artificially low and that seems to benefit us but it also means that so many of us are out of work or under employed. But if you straighten out trade balance and currency manipulation Chinese products become more expensive as they naturally should be, local U.S. goods become more accessible and less expensive to a degree and and we have more people with more buying power (because employment) to make the economy work.