It's a great device (for certain use-cases). My advice would be to just avoid the cloud features anyway if you can. If some of them are important to you, and can't be replaced by third-party tools (many can), yeah maybe a different device is better for you.

I never even created a cloud account, partly for privacy, partly to avoid crap like this.

It's the double hit though... they're also jacking the Marker Plus price to try to force a subscription.

Yeah that's a kick in the pants. Maybe just buy second-hand? Not sure.

The cloud features were never promised, your wife is getting an early adopter bonus.

It also doesn't preclude devs from developing 3rd party sync solutions.