Compare their budget servers against other budget servers and they're going to lose out on CPU, RAM and bandwidth tier for the price you pay. Not everyone who is cheaper is offering inferior service, either. While I am sure I could negotiate a nice deal with Softlayer, I'd rather deal with people who are offering a better value up front. But perhaps I'm biased, as I tend to provision quite a few cheap machines for ESXi farms and I don't need nor want anyone's support beyond prompt hardware replacement and their network performing as expected.

I'm a SoftLayer employee, so my perspective on this might help ... A server at SoftLayer is often more expensive than the same server at another provider, but those identical server specs don't necessarily make it an "apples to apples" comparison. When you don't need any of the free value-add functionality that differentiates a SoftLayer server (which I won't include here for fear of being "salesy"), the numbers probably won't add up. SoftLayer isn't positioned in the market to compete on price, and you're right that there are a lot of quality hosters who offer reliable, powerful servers for lower costs.