That's how I feel about clones in general. Ok, I owned a real Commodore 64, but all my PCs during my formative years were clones.
Actually, this wasn't such a good example since I believe PC clones were legal. Let me change it to something more controversial:
I feel the same way about software piracy. All my games and software growing up were pirated. I didn't even understand this, because you got software by going to a store and buying it, e.g. C64 games... but it was all warez. Same with DOS or Windows (which one usually got from someone else). All of my early programming languages were pirated too: QuickBasic, GW Basic, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, etc.
And this is how people got acquainted with computers, and then got into programming (games, systems, business software) as a job. So piracy was a net win.
I do recall the assistant at the store when I first showed up said wait for the upcoming Commodore 64 more stuff for much less money. But as a 14 year old I wasn't ready to wait after being exposed to Apple the summer before. That professor really advocated for the Atari 800 and I really considered it, but the Apple's easier to copy floppies along with a much larger user base won me over.