It could be. I would say it's unlikely, given they had no problem handling a technical discussion when asking me to demonstrate it was a hardware problem (it was done in several mails, during which they asked relevant questions after each of my mails). I guess it may have been handled by a different team, though, sending the ticket back when confident it was indeed related to hardware.
Well, I can certainly provide an argument against expectations of long term usage as well.
I bought a pinebook pro, perfectly knowing the performances limitations this article discusses, and actually _wanting_ to learn to live with a less powerful computer, consuming less electricity. In a era where we're roasting Earth, this sounded almost like a duty to me.
But when I received the computer, I had a blocking problem with it : its SD card reader was faulty and would trigger I/O errors after a few writes, and the OS would remount the device as read-only. This is a major problem on that computer because it has very low internal storage space so you're supposed to use a SD card to hold data. I tried various OS, various SD cards, did my due diligence to confirm it was a hardware problem - it was.
I wasn't that annoyed at that point because pine64 sells spare parts on their web shop. So I went there to replace the SD card reader, which meant replacing the main board as well, but OK. This was all very fairly priced, so no problem. Except… the spare part was out of stock. So I waited a few weeks, and it was still out of stock.
I mailed their support presenting my problem and asking a simple question : will spare parts will ever be available again?
They answered by asking me to demonstrate this was a hardware issue, which I did. They did not answer my question, so I asked it again, telling them that I was not wishing to make the device travel the world and back, I just wanted to replace the faulty part. They answered me with the address were I should ship the computer to them. So I asked them again directly : will the spare parts will ever be available again? They dodged the question once again and asked me to send them the computer.
I guess asking to ship them a faulty product is totally fair, they want to inspect it. I'm not willing do to that because we fly way enough products around the world as is, and I can do any check they want me to do locally. But fair enough, they want it back to solve my problem.
What troubles me, though, and what is relevant here is that while they advertise selling spare parts for their computer, they actually don't, and they're shady when asked if they will again. Which probably means they won't. So yeah, I wouldn't bet on long term usage if you have an experimental device that you can't repair.