Now, if you were a professional, that quality control and warranty (not to mention better ergonomics, etc.) were easily worth the added cost, but for just "some dude who liked playing video games and doing some photo/video editing", it was a great bang for the buck.
I still use this as my main monitor and haven't noticed any dead pixels (if there are any, they're so hard to see that they may as well not be there). It's not the best monitor out there and you can probably get a better 2560x1440 display for less now, but at the time it was a big improvement over the cheap 1920x1080 display that quickly got demoted to secondary (and has now been loaned indefinitely to a teacher friend who needed a second monitor to plug into her laptop for online classes).