The point is to purchase a quality stick.  The software will be keyed to the hardware.  If you buy a cheep dollar store stick and it fails, now you have a headache getting the software re-keyed to a new stick.  Sure, every stick will fail eventually but the odds are less if its from a quality manufacturer.

For the sake of less hastle chance I am willing to pay $10-$20 for a good quality stick rather than going to the dollar store and getting a Hello Kitty stick for $1 and risking $1200 software on it.