I certainly like mine a lot. There's a learning curve that comes with it, and you have to be really comfortable with computers to get a lot of the software to work the first time, but with a little tinkering the SDRplay makes quite a decent shortwave receiver, as well as for the public safety bands, CB, ham, aircraft… Anything between about 20 kHz and 1.3 GHz.
Although it's advertised as gapless coverage, there are some bands where images are an issue, so if you're looking to snoop the 200-275 MHz region, for example, you'll want to employ an FM trap to filter out the FM band. And the SW reception really needs an AM filter to kill off the AM band, otherwise you'll get your local stations all up and down the dial.
The convenience of having a visual interface on the PC, plus a choice of free software apps to use as the front end, negates a lot of the issues for me. The ability to record entire swaths of whatever band you're interested in for later playback are icing on the cake. You can easily record everything from 540-1710 AM into one IQ file if you want to do nighttime DX but not actually stay up all night to do it, for example. Or record the entire 6 m ham band to listen for beacons and openings later when you have free time. Or an entire segment of the SW band, then go back and listen for pirates or data broadcasts, which you can then go back and play over and over until you figure out how to decode them.
I'd probably recommend anyone who wants to get one to use it with a laptop, though. That way you can take yourself away from sources of interference, like wall warts and other home devices that spew noise. But even if you're tethered to a desktop PC like me, it works fine as long as you have a sufficiently grounded outdoor antenna.
