I picked up a Bambino to replace a dying old pressurized portafilter thermoblock machine with something a little more capable a month or so ago. I was planning and prepared to spend more on a "more serious" machine (original first choice was a Lelit PL41TEM) and ended up with the Bambino after I read up on the options.

The bundled accessories including the portafilter feel cheap but are easily replaced, the UI for manual shot control is slightly awkward (Hold to preeinfuse, release to extract, press again to stop) ...and the performance is generally great. Mine did come with 4 baskets, an 8-11g and a 16-19g in both pressurized and unpressurized, which is a great trick to compete in both markets (the top of the pressurized filter "easy short coffee" market and the bottom of the "real" grind-controls-infusion espresso market).

The big selling point on the "Thermojet" Brevilles for me is the heat-up time; I make espresso as a sort of morning meditation when I wake up, and I didn't want to have to wait or rig a timer to give a massive boiler machine the tens of minutes they take to properly heat. With the Bambino I can walk up, tap a button to wake, press again a few seconds later to let it auto-cycle one blank shot to heat the head and (empty) portafilter while I deal with measuring and grinding beans, and be good to go.

It's true you're stuck at the factory pressure profile (other than controlling how long the preeinfusion runs) and the ~93°C of the factory PID, which isn't ideal for particularly light roasts or radical shot setups. With some grind tweaking (I bought a Turin SK40 with continuous adjustment at the same time) I've produced pleasing shots out of some beans firmly in the "medium-to-light" range, but haven't tried to brew anything "3rd wave light" yet, which is where the rules of thumb take you out of the traditional settings.

It's a $350 machine and you're into the $700 range with something like a Lelit PL41TEM (if you can find one) or a modded Gaggia Classic Pro to get user controllable PID and a pressure gauge that isn't purely cosmetic. It's trite to say, but spend the difference on a better grinder and you'll come out ahead. The $200 things like my SK40 or the Baratza Encore ESP are kind of the minimum ante for "real" espresso, and those are recent additions to the market.

I read somewhere that it strips the metadata to protect your privacy (considering the information that can be stored on there, like your exact location), but I'm not sure if it actually does. I'm assuming that, if it does strip it, it doesn't read the rotation data before it strips.