I'm going to argue that this only applies for the US. No way in hell am I building a 1080p gaming PC for under 550 dollars in Canada. My NES can do 1080p if all it was doing was a black screen. It's all about how much detail you want on screen. If I want more stuff I'm spending more money.

The odd thing is that if you want more detail it's universally going to cost you more money.

I'm with you here! However i only upgrade to remove bottlenecks. The last one I did I went from a pentium dual core (e6500) to my current AMD FX-6300, new ATX format motherboard (since I had a mATX one before) and faster RAM. Next major upgrades in my household are required by two computers we have, that said replacing 7 year old hard drives before they die.

I generally do a "full upgrade" every 3-4 years.  That doesn't include stuff like computer case, monitor, hard drives, and other peripherals.  Just the basics like vid card, RAM, mobo, and processor. And possibly power supply. I usually go a couple steps down from "top of the line" so it ends up costing me 1000-1200 every 3-4 years. And that's Canadian dollars, for what it's worth.

i'm not even going to watch it and predict the break down doesn't include a case, power supply, cooling fan, (legal) operating system, keyboard, or mouse. you know,.. all those essential non-essentials.

am i right?

Wrong (other than the OS, I think)

Then maybe you should watch it, short of the OS everything is included... otherwise its not even a PC. What sort of PC doesn't include a PSU?

I know that feeling as a fellow Canadian. I just try to find a nice middle ground. I only paid around 340 dollars for my upgrades, but then again I went with 4gb of RAM instead of something like 8gb. I didn't but in to ASUS or Gigabyte for motherboards, I went with a cheaper MSI board and the RAM I got was only like 60 bucks and its gaming RAM. Although upgrades I want to do is RAM and video card, what I need to is hard drive. I try to think, what's going to last 6-7  or even 8 years. 

I'm surprised you have to do much of anything with the RAM. It hasn't had any significant gains or changes in years now.

for games not pushing graphical capabilities, yes. 

$550 is very doable if you are sane with settings. 1080p high details, medium shadows, low AA, even a 750ti oc edition can run Titanfall, BF4, etc quite well. Max details + high AA and max shadows are framerate killers.