From all the researching I've managed to do, the big issue w/ the cheap(er) testers seems to be that the transducers they come with aren't adequate for reading the curved surface of a cylinder accurately. Anything that seems to get a decent review for those types of measurements is still about $1K, even though the $150 units can be functional for measurements of flat surfaces.
I think if I could find something in the $500 range that could do a bore, I'd pop for it. But 2x that is a lot harder to commit to...