Some of those "awful home keyboards" have pretty powerful synths inside them. My PSR740 has essentially an MU100 locked inside - same (or similar) chips etc. (16 parts ony though and some of the non-XG instruments are different). It just doesn't have all the knobs and sliders. But with the right program on the PC via sysex you have access to 4 DSPs, each with up to 102 effects and 16 parameters per effect, plus all the drum kits and other stuff.