Actually, Asus makes some of the best PC laptops in existence if you ignore the cheap ass stuff that all manufacturers make. The last two new laptops I purchased were Asus laptops. The build quality is on par with Apple's laptops. They don't lock down the BIOS so you can't use Windows 7 - the ACPI 5.0-only age is upon us so that even if you kill Secure Boot and try to install Win7 as UEFI it'll BSOD and say your machine is not ACPI compiant, but I have seen zero brand new Asus laptops that do this crap and plenty of cheap new Acer boxes that do. They're engineered quite well compared to many other manufacturers who will take your $1000 and sell you a crummy plastic laptop with hot palmrests and screws that easily back out and fall out of the computer over time. Same deal with their motherboards: if you don't buy the absolute $40 bargain basement junker boards that no manufacturer really seems to get right, you always seem to get a solid board with a BIOS that lets you change and re-clock and tune everything under the sun to your liking if you so desire.
The real problem is that lots of people buy cheap shit computer hardware and they get exactly what they pay for when they do. All manufacturers come out with duds too (that's just how it goes in the manufacturing game) so reading reviews before purchasing is far more important than the name stamped or painted on the item's casing. Branding isn't as important today as it used to be. In the end Foxconn, Quanta, and Compal actually manufacture almost all of this stuff, so the quality often comes down to the engineering of the specific model of board or laptop and who it was made for.