In my experience with said expensive hardware, it greatly depends on your use-case / scale.

You have to pay attention to stay within the limits of the hardware the switches (TCAM, etc...). And correct me, if I am wrong, but most NICs are fairly constrained in their hardware support on the numbers of MACs they can filter for. And those two combined, you might end up with a lot of flooding, which needs to be handled by the CPU again.

You also have to rely on the implementation of your vendor. And at least with one major vendor, who shall remain nameless, it is a major effort just to get acknowledged that there is a bug.