The best part about this motherboard is the 5-year warranty. Otherwise, I don't see much special about it. I hate fans on motherboards since they tend to die.

I find it very hard to get excited about IVB/Z77 chipset when Haswell is not that far away (April 2013).

Also, I don't agree with you that Asus is all marketing. They have some great features on their motherboards:

1) The best UEFI BIOS in the business;
2) The most flexible fan control (each fan header can be assigned a manual fan curve);
3) One of the faster USB 3.0 implementations among all Z77 motherboards;
4) Their ROG series boards have the most robust BIOS settings. Asus V Gene for $200 is one of the best overclocking boards on Z77 chipset.

So while I think this board has a bunch of useless features, besides the 5 year warranty, other Asus boards are quite good.