Let me take this piece by piece:
bullshit, check around, creatives current drivers are full of buggs, read their forums, ask around on here and other places, plenty of people have things like.
100% cpu use on some x-fi models
mode change not working
drivers failing to start/work(rare these days but it still happens!!)
How come I've come across such issues with neiher my Xtreme Gamer nor X-Fi Prelude 7.1 ? so haven't the many TPU users with X-Fi cards? Here's the whole thing: People don't know how to use the cards in accordance to the electronic documentation that ship with the cards, change the modes when an audio application is active and reserved hardware channels and you're bound for the card locking up because when in entertainment mode, the card is no better than any other card, it uses the CPU for audio sampling and the CA20K1 is inert. When you switch to the Game mode, the audio stacks are re-routed to the CA20K1 and if there's an active audio application that has reserved two hardware sound channels irrespective of it playing audio, you're bound for a crash, which is why there's a clear mention to quit all audio applications when switching modes. 100% CPU usage has 1000000 reasons behind it, no sound card can load the CPU 100% unless it's a 80486 we're talking about. the CPU usage could be because of other processes and while mode switch, the CPU has to perform many operations to re-route the audio data-path at a hardware level.
as to cmedia, your a MORON, i have personaly requested updates from their FORUMS that are in ENGLISH and had their programer post an update within 2 days, cmedia also has updated drivers for chips as old as the 8738, a card as old as the sblive, creative dosnt even have proper working drivers for xp x64 for the SB live 5.1 cards....yet cmedia updated their 8738 drivers for 2000,xp,xp64,vista(all versions) gee i think that shows they do care about costmers not just selling their latist and greatist chipset with the go faster stripes and extreamly bloated software pack.
http://www.cmedia.com.tw/forums/viewforum.php?f=6&sid=b2fc31b266e374cabf6c9b8c2ed343d2
just an example, check around, cmedia has updated drivers for their oldist chips be it ac97 or full on codecs.
I hope you already know that every old sound card for which you don't find a driver on Creative's website has a reason for it, that the Windows OS from Windows 2000 upwards ships with the latest stable drivers for it, just that you don't get the fancy applications and that's justified, My 1996 SB Ensoniq PCI card has a superb driver that Windows XP came with that made it sound better than with those older drivers. The driver provider is Creative. So oldest drivers being avaiable on C-Media's website actually goes on to show C-Media failed in sharing their latest drivers with Microsoft to include in their OS releases, which Creative did. The oldest Sound Blaster PCI can still work brilliantly on any Windows XP machine but even Windows XP SP2 doesn't come with bundled drivers for the CMI8738.
and i hate to mention this but eax is crap, the ONLY reasion the cmedia cards dont have current EAX support is NOTHING to do with hardware, its creative not wanting to allow another company to support their only selling point, even if that selling point is based on a lie, once you hit a certen number of voices the human brain cant prosess any more and it just becomes noise, eax3/4/5 are past that limmit.
skunkshit. Did you ever play Doom 3 with EAX 4.0 HD on? Play it and do yourself a big favour why are so many games coming with HW sampling of audio, reverb effects? You have to experience it and then speak and not simply call something crap just because you don't have it (I used a X-Meridean for a month, my cousins on his machine and I liked it for its components more than the CMI 8788).
also not some current games dont even support eax above 2 because the vast majority of gamers have onboard sound or cards that arent by creative.
Valve Source engine does EAX 3.0, Unreal Engine 3 does EAX 5.0 HD, CryEngine 2 does EAX 3.0, id Doom 3 engine derived games do EAX 4.0 HD under OpenAL. Pretty much every good current game title uses either of the above engines. If you ask me, EAX 4 ~ 5 HD (24-bit, 192 KHz sample rate, 128 hardware and 65536 software voices) is a big loss if I don't choose a sound-card with the X-Fi processor. If there aren't sufficient hardware voice channels, you're bound for choppy, scratchy audio.
as to your 80$ question.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829271001
cmedia 8770 based "HT OMEGA STRIKER 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card - Retail"
Puhleez, did you even read when I said "overall system performance"? The X-Fi cards really do give performance boost when gaming, and for what I get for $80 from a Xtreme Gamer is more than what I get from a Striker, sure it comes with the DTS/DD formats et al but the pros of the X-Fi far outrun that from a Striker. Hardware accelerated audio, better music with the Crystalizer, etc.
check the specs of the 8770 vs the x-fi for specs and abilitys, hate to tell ya this but dispite lack of an APU it still gives better sound with effectivly no perf impact, compared against the x-fi in reviews i have seen there effectivly no diffrance, the x-fi can do some stuff in hardware that the cmi cards do with cpu, but the cmi cards drivers are FAR lighter on the system, they are SMALL they work excelently, the creative drivers are what now 50mb or more?
lets do a dirrect comparison here
cmi 8788 driver is 5.3mb for the FULL DRIVER including the full xear suit(eq and such)
creative x-fi xgamer edition driver is 43.53 MB thats the basic driver mind you......
so 5.3mb
vs 43.53 MB
i will look up the charts somebody posted on here comparing the x-fi specs to the 8770 and such from cmi(auzentech cards) it was quite a slap in the face to x-fi when it came to quility and fetures.......specly since AFIK they still dont got vista drivers 100% for the x-fi and hardware acceleration........
Congratulations, you lose. Forget the CMI 8770, let's take on CMI 8788 instead, with all the applications you claim don't do big deal with X-Fi:
Continue reading this article:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/sound/456/9
Woh oh, you have a problem with a 43.53 MB driver
are you running your system off a pen-drive? Don't NVidia Foreware also come around 30~42 MB? For all the OpenAL ICD, the configuration modules, the software libraries for the countless features, 44 MB is more than justified.
just that you should be a fluent Chinese speaker to even say Hi to them, start off with Yihao. Problem is that Sound Blaster cards come with so many features that people get confused with them and contact Creative for things as trivial as "How do I attach a microphone", "How to change to Game mode", etc. 
Where does that makes sense?