ARW77:
It always has been and always will be designed for a club enviroment. Mind you, I know one thing, they're built like engineering bricks inside out and it would never fail on you!
Another plus point would be the motor, being quartz direct driven, is ultra steady and of course, they're more resistant to vibration than pretty much any other deck. They're just not the "purest" of designs though so because of that I think I'd be looking elsewhere for a nice Hi-Fi deck.
Oddly enough, the deck was never intended to be a DJ bit of kit, rather, that group adopted it. It was a home turntable (and a look at the Technics decks from the late 70s shows it was more of an evolutionary design as opposed to one based on the DJ community's needs) first and foremost, but like a lot of designs in hi-fi of the time, there was some hefty over-engineering going on.
I think it filled more of the boxes DJs wanted ticked, so perhaps more happy coincidence than anything else. What is a given though is without the dance music community, we'd have struggled to keep vinyl afloat for as long as it did from the early 1990s.