But these do not compare with the like of Speedotron and the others.
Light is light for the most part. There are a few instances where you get color shifts, but it's no brand-based as much as it is strobe-design-based. I've yet to see a picture taken with a Speedtron that couldn't be taken with something from Paul C. Buff, Inc.
Speedtrons are built like tanks, but that doesn't make a bunch of difference if (a) you don't do a lot of travel and (b) when you do, it's not all that uncivilized. Also, the price difference gets you more heads, which gives you more redundancy if you're not traveling all that light, or if you're in a single studio. I also think these days you're not going to get the same level of resiliency as the number of capacitor manufacturers and capacitor quality isn't what it was in the days when a lot of the units gained their reputation.
My Novatron pack and head system is probably 10-12 years old, and my Bees are about a year old, neither of them have caused me any issues so far. If the ABs didn't have their own fans, I could see a better argument against them, but the fact is that PCB has fully 50% of the strobe market- way more than any of his competitors, and if they sucked then there wouldn't be many successful weekend warriors using them and it'd be plastered all over the Internet.
The fact that the next set of ABs will work on non-sine wave inverters says a lot about PCB to me- since they make really good money off of their battery packs with the sine wave inverters.
YMMV