I grabbed a printrbot Simple Metal when it was first announced, received it 2-3 weeks ago. A laser cut wood printer was not of interest, nor was spending anywhere near $2K for the makerbot machines. I probably would not have jumped on the printrbot if it were much more than the $600 it cost.
My use is mostly for woodworking gadgets and prototyping new ideas. So far using it has been dead simple, I whacked together a couple models in Sketchup, exported them to .stl files, imported them into Repetier-Host, processed with slicr and printed. Every piece of software in the process is free and works great.
The print quality is only okay, and I don't know enough about this yet to understand if this is due to the limitations of the machine or my own ignorance. The Simple also is limited to printing PLA and it's pretty slow. This little gadget took at least 20 minutes to print:
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I also found that, printing holes for example, the tolerances are not that good. In another part there was a 6.5 mm hole, and when done it still had to be drilled out for a 6 mm cap screw to fit thru. I assumed a 0.5 mm tolerance would work but apparently not.
On the plus side the Simple has a bed-leveling gadget built in that seems to work, and there was no problem using blue masking tape on the bed and getting the print to stick and come off. Overall it has been a fairly painless experience so far.
RMW