Your link was to Starlight Xpress and most of those camera's costs many thousands of dollars. Nobody looking at a SAC is going to be considering a Starlight Xpress. I have owned both Meade camera's, a Starlight Express MX716 (over $3000.00 when I bought it), a non modified Canon 10D and I have also owned an SBIG and am currently negotiating the purchase of another. I have produced images using these cameras through a range of telescopes including 8" SCT's, 12"SCT's and 80mm Orion APO's. There is no question that a high end camera will kill a non cooled Canon DSLR. But so they should at prices ranging from 3K to 11K what else would you expect them to do. The Canons have produced remarkable pictures out of the box that cannot be matched by anything in a similar price bracket including SAC's and the Meade DSI's. Perhaps you are operating under the belief that the non cooled non modified camera cannot go deep?
The attached images are recognisable to us all and were taken with my unmodified Canon 10D, exposures are 24 minutes made up of combining 1 minute images and were taken from the Golden Grove Observatory in WA earlier this Year.
My point was more about value for money and pretty pictures than anything else. You can produce pictures that a printable and frameable (in A3 size if you want) easily with the Canons but that is not true of most other cooled camera's out there for anything approaching the same dollars. Remember you can be set up with a Canon including focusing and image management software for less than $1500.00. I have seen the results of regular Joes using those other cameras and they are for the most part not something you would frame and hang on your wall. Just for fun I spent the last 20 minutes flicking through editions of Sky and telescope for images in the readers gallery and what I noticed was a lot of SBIG, Canon 300D and 10D images but I didn't find any SAC or low cost Starlight Xpress or similar images. Simply put if you want to produce an image that you would love to show to a non astro nut then you need to spend very big bucks or go the DSLR route.
You made the point that you don't think there would be such a large Cooled CCD market if they didn't perform. Correct but then there hasn't been an uncooled DSLR market until the last few years and look what a change that has introduced even Canon are producing a specific model of camera for Astronomers...
As an aside Chris Venter, developer of DSLRFocus is a friend of mine and has sold over 1800 copies of his software so far.
Apologies for the long reponse but I AM a user of these cameras and HAVE spent more time than I should looking at the results of many users and they DONT stack up.