Yes, but it is very easy for a Homeseer user to add MainLobby to the mix to get that high function touch screen support with reliability. Yes, some additional cost, but with great power and flexibility. No out of the box functionality today like Maestro can provide to Homeseer users, but Maestro is limited in customization and power.
Perhaps. But I'm not totally sure how adding ML to HS makes HS more reliable necessarily. And you are getting closer to CQC's cost as well when you add them both together, plus the extra charges involved in each of them, separate upgrade charges over time, two separate programs to have to integrate, separate system configuration interfaces, and so forth.
It doesn't necessarily make Homeseer more reliable. Homeseer IS reliable. So is MainLobby. You can have MLServer watch over Homeseer and visa versa to make sure all processes and PCs are working the way they are suppose to be, and if not restart / relaunch / send email or whatever, but that really isn't even needed because they both just work. Just like Windows...it's not the OS that is unreliable, it's what people do with them in the wild that CAN make it unreliable. No different than any of the flavors discussed here. A bad driver on a CQC server will surely crash it. Good installations include good drivers on good hardware for CQC to be reliable (and other issues).
The combo of HS, MainLobby and the MLHSPlugin is less than CQC. And does provide pocketpc coverage. Now, if you add up all of the possible drivers / apps from Homeseer and MainLobby of course it will exceed the price of CQC. But, no one has a need to do that. That's proven. My guess is that most "full boat system" will be similar in price to the CQC product. Now, a few might say "if you add this, that and this other thing here, that will be more money" and tecnically be correct. It just doesn't happen that way. Could it - of course. Just doesn't often.