I'm actually a marketing professor, I run consumer behavior studies on "interface psychology" exploring how changes in technology interfaces affect how we consume and use media as consumers (i.e. does shopping on a touchscreen vs a mouse change how we perceive products, what happens when brands are introduced into interactive game environments etc).
I don't actually remotely need a PC this powerful. I do need to edit video for some of my study stimuli (making custom commercials, etc), but I have a ludicrously powerful workstation in my lab for that stuff. But when they agreed to buy me a new home desktop (something they normally don't do), they said as long as it was a Dell, I could get whatever I wanted. So on a lark I submitted a request for a pretty maxxed-out new Alienware Area-51 desktop, expecting them to say no. The thing is a riot; it looks like a neon ttriangular spaceship and there is NO WAY it can be mistaken for a work machine...... but they basically don't care. From a departmental perspective, it's not that big a deal I guess; given I normally mostly go to domestic conferences rather than international conferences they might be viewing this home splurge as making up that cost difference.
As for the mechanical keyboard, the key thing is the "trigger" that registers the button press isn't "fully-slammed-down" like with a normal membrane keyboard; you don't need to bottom the keys out to trigger the letterpress (and the Brown switches I have have a tactile "bump" at the trigger point). The keys just feel fantastic, and the thing sounds amazing too. Clicky, but not annoyingly so.