The primary advantage of dedicated hardware accelerators for the past ~15 years been power efficiency, rather than performance. Not much of a problem on a desktop, but very noticeable on mobile devices.
Also, I expect one or more of the following from a 50" 8K TV at that price:
- Bundled with ad/spyware.
- Poor image and/or sound quality.
- Doesn’t last long, or image quality very noticeably degrades after a relatively short amount of use.
I also wonder if perhaps it’s still like back when HD was still new, where TVs would advertise “Full HD”, but were actually only referring to being able to accept a 1080p input signal which they would then downscale to their <720p LCD panels.