True. I bet if the hardware was cheap enough, the software would advance a lot quicker.
I mean, imagine the only really useful thing one of these things can do is make a copy of itself. And it might takes it a month running non-stop to do it, but the parts are cheap so it only costs a few hundred bucks for a new one. Would you want one of these things in your basement working away? I sure would. And I'd be pretty interested in tweaking its software and training data and whatnot to make it faster and better.
Sure it'll be a good while before it is folding laundry or picking weeds in the garden or whatever, but I think the pace of improvement would pick up quick once these things are available in mass.