You pretty much got it. The selling points are repairability, upgradability, a company that isn’t consumer hostile, and Linux support/compatibility. Not everyone needs these things and not everyone wants to pay what they cost. Framework also doesn’t really provide the sort of warranty and support services that most companies would require (although they are less necessary in a device that can be repaired easily).

Buy what you need and can afford. Be glad that we have choices as consumers and that Framework is contributing to that.

SMB only (There is/was a way to make Windows do NFS, but it sucked.)

License cost. The desktop versions of windows (used to?) have a limit on concurrent SMB sessions in order to force users to buy the server version and pay for CALs. No idea how any of that works now.

NTFS is kind of a shitty filesystem.

Limited (native) backup options. No tape support, for example.

Management effectively requires GUI access.

No native way to mirror the OS drive in software. You need either a hardware RAID card (LSI, etc.) or that stupid Intel BIOS RAID thing.

These may or may not be issues for OP, but they are issues for many.

Yes, it works fine. There is a very slight performance penalty, but not one that most will notice.

Nice deal! I have no use case for it, but have been tempted just because the price is so damn good.

You will likely hit the RAM limit (64GB) before you run out of processing power for most “normal” VM use cases. You should easily be able to run a dozen or so VMs.

Umm…BIND?