I beg to differ; I have in fact, repeatedly advised customers of mine to forego the Mac Pro in favor of an iMac this year. And many of them were people who believed they needed "a Mac Pro, nothing less", kept upgrading their old (Mac Pro) machines instead of purchasing a new faster (i)Mac, etc. etc
I do believe it to absolutely make sense "from a business standpoint" for many of them.
A Mac Pro just currently just isn't a good value proposition in terms of price/performance for many:
"1000$ more for a Mac Pro won't buy you a faster computer".
A current top-end iMac(3.4GHz i7, SSD) offers about the same performance as a 6-core 3.33 Xeon Mac Pro in most applications*. Yet even with its "27" built-in Cinema Display", the iMac costs 1000 USD less than the display-less Mac Pro.
* Slightly more in Photoshop, DTP etc , and only a bit less for heavily multithreaded encoding/rendering.
And you're not going to make the Mac Pro faster with any upgrades - it's CPU stays the same, greater RAM expandability won't matter, save for only the most exotic applications, external HDs can be added externally via Thunderbolt (if admittedly at a higher price due to the casing/controller needed - yet often still less than a Mac Pro with multiple internal drives - and then, the iMac still has the advantage of including a big display).
So why and where's the iMac supposed to be "nonsense", "from a business standpoint"?
First of all you bolding out stuff to make me look dumb isn't quite the nice touch. Just wanted to point that out.
Second - and that is a big second - the mere fact, that I can buy a consumer oriented all-in-one machine that is faster than the so called Pro workstation should make your grey cells fire in repent.
But that was and is Apple's business decision - we don't upgrade the MacPro so people keep buying our shiny iMacs.
Third - and that was my main point - from a business POV it is stupid to replace something that doesn't need a replacement every year. With each and every upgrade I have to buy a new display.
This is mainly due to Apple's policy in upgrading. I understand your point, that Pros should toss out the money to upgrade to iMacs as they are currently more bang for the buck.
But I will say again - it is a strong commitment to the Mac platform to throw away a perfectly viable display every two years. It doesn't make any sense and to say the least it is very unecological.
Heck - even if you had the chance to buy a Mac Mini with the internals of the top-of-the-line iMac it would be the better business decision as (and now I bold that so you may see my point) there is absolutely no logical reason to throw out around 300 bucks every two years for a new display than being forced to do it by Apple!