There's also a subtext that makes me a bit nervous. The OEM did not build these monitors as an act of charity. They were ordered by someone, with the intent of selling them at a much higher price.

When you see a deal like this -- especially if the monitors are actually of better quality than represented in the ad -- it means that someone at a major PC manufacturer ordered a metric assload too many monitors. Why/how did that happen? Does it signal a larger market collapse?