If you want to play real pc games get a desktop or a console unless you have a lot of money to spend.
How do you deal with the rest of the consumer universe? I'm betting you get along just fine.
Yes, because I couldn't care less. I do care about my laptop, though. If anything because it's 1,500 or more.
I put in a solid hour of research at least before buying a new pair of boots. It took me many hours over many days to choose a camera. Took me weeks to build my PC. Each of those products I put in an amount of research that's at least somehow correlated with the price I paid for them (boots -> 100$ -> camera 600$ -> PC $1300)
So, yea, research is a bit tricky, but that's good because the reason it's tricky is because you aren't depending on the company to tell you the real value of their product.
What annoy me are the people that are supposed to make researching easy (for their own good) but make it a lot harder than it should be.