What's the point of a fancy SDR on the lower bands though? At least in the States most of the amateur bands with any kind of useful propagation are so narrow that one of the brain dead simple sound card SDR rigs can cover the majority of your band of choice.
This is going to be long-winded; there's quite a bit to cover. Sorry. :)
Cover, yes. Cover well, no. You need lots of bit depth for adequate dynamic range without filters, bit depth almost no one offers, and if you don't have adequate bit depth, then you really need front end filtering and probably a stepped attenuator as well. You need EM protection because HF antennas tend to be large and prone to large induced voltages. You need good frequency linearity if you want to use the SDR to get accurate measurements (even the s-meter.) For the ham bands, it's also nice if the SDR supports a sample rate of 400 khz or better, which is tough for a sound card SDR. Then there is frequency accuracy and stability, not to mention external reference sources (there all kinds of cool things you can do with a very stable SDR, like this AM graveyard band carrier forest), and then we get into multiple front ends for diversity reception and noise reduction. If you want to remote the SDR for any reason, you really need ethernet, and if you need ethernet, you need some smarts. And you need ethernet anyway, because USB bloody sucks (speaking as a cross-platform developer.) So If you want a good SDR, you just don't end up with a "brain dead simple" SDR.
As to narrow ham bands in the HF range, well, not really. 160 meters is 200 kHz. 80 meters is 500 kHz. 20 meters is 350 KHz. 15 meters is 450 kHz. 10 meters is 1.7 MHz. The WARC bands are all pretty tiny. Also, for SWL, some of those are quite wide, and even more so if you include the out of band regions where the pirates are. Pirates being quite unpredictable, you want them in the spectrum so you can see them when they pop up, so bandwidth is quite relevant if they are of interest (personally, I find them fascinating.) Come to that, if you want to see what overall prop/activity is looking like, you need 30 MHz of bandwidth to do it live.
I will grant you that someday, we may be able to put a 48 bit, multiple Gs/s A/D on a chip with a full ethernet interface cheap enough for anyone to own; but not right now. Until that day, good SDRs will not be "brain dead simple."
More on frequency range: If you want to use the SDR for a panadaptor for an existing receiver (very common use), then it has to cover one of the IF frequencies and associated bandwidth of the receiver, which tends to be in the HF range (not always, though.) Then there are cray-cray folk like myself; among other things, I use my SDR to monitor bats in our attic. To do that, the SDR has to be able to do a good job with the first 100 KHz, also true of experimentation with sonar and other audio ranging and detecting tech.
I'm not saying there isn't stuff up higher than HF; of course there is. Some of the really cool stuff (wifi, for instance) is as high as 5 GHz. Satellites, public utilities, etc. Any motion video needs to be up pretty high (but it also needs very significant bandwidth.) But HF has a huge amount of interest, it's where most hams actually hang out, and as it's a very challenging reception environment, higher end designs are of great interest. So are hackable designs one can get at. For instance, if you built yourself a multi-stage filter bank for the various HF bands, you could have them switch automatically as you tune. Likewise you could control add-on attenuators, RF preamps, and switchable transverters (which can give a nominally lower freq range SDR excellent access to higher bands.)
I have a variety of SDRs, and switching is simply a matter of prodding a menu. I have access from about 1 Hz to 3 GHz across the group, with varying features as described above. In the end, as HF is so very active, that's where I usually end up listening. Although I'm an extra and have a full station, I do a lot more listening than transmitting. In the day, I lurk on 20 meters and up, though again as the sunspot count drops, that'll go back to only 20 meters. In the evening, 40 through 160 come alive, as well as many of the SW bands, and it's DX time, trying to catch the low power African and South American stations.
I think it's fair to say that most hams are, to coin a usage, "HF hams" first, and "VHF and above hams" second, if at all. VHF never offered much in terms of DX contacts or reliable prop events, so it was always about just communicating. With cellphones, that hook went away, and I'm guessing that's what accounts for the dead 2m and 70cm bands. But the HF bands are busy, and the number of hams keeps growing... so that leads me to think that an SDR aimed at hams can really use low band capability.
PS - I have VHF and UHF in the car and several units at home, plus an HT I carry in my man-bag (ie, purse.) I have a 14 element 2m beam. I can hit about eight repeaters from here, covering thousands of square miles. I hear *nothing* at home. I'm not hearing any VHF packet any longer, either. My lonely packet BBS beacon squirts out there by itself, no visitors and no digipeating and it has been that way for I don't even know how long. Trips to the cities nearest me result in dead silence on the calling frequencies and local repeaters, though I have to admit I don't make any calls myself -- I'm just curious so I listen.
Anyway, it's just one guy's opinion / anecdote, it isn't data, you have to listen to your own area and draw your own conclusions. Perhaps it's just Montana and surrounds. It certainly won't hurt anyone if I don't use a particular SDR. It'll have an effect if I don't support it, though, so hopefully, frequency range of 50-1000 or not, it has a protocol-compliant ethernet interface or some kindhearted person writes a USB-to-ethernet server on at least one platform so I can do so. :)