but at least the price of FCP now is a 5th of that which I paid for the original one a good few years back.
Tell me about it... I was doing some spring (well, mid-winter) cleaning and ended up disposing of one of those black cube FCP boxes for which you pay much less today !
Same thing with an old QuarkXPress desktop publishing box. Unlike Apple, Quark didn't put up much of a fight against Adobe and a hefty proportion of its users migrated over to InDesign.
I haven't used FCP X (only because I don't do much video editing any more) but from what I hear Apple have done a good job of it and are giving Adobe Premiere a run for its money. And indeed, with the advent of the Adobe Cloud, many people are looking around for non-subscription perpetual use options.
As I'm sure you are doubtless aware, you can trial FCP X by
going here on the Apple website....