[mzltest]

You are right saying that nowadays mid-range devices from China have the same quality of known brands... But the things that scaries me is the "post-market" experience. We all know Huawei, Samsung, Sony, Google, Asus, One Plus rollout updates very often for their devices (well lately OnePlus is lacking a bit). 

Does Xiaomi and Oppo releases update on fixed cycle? Does the phone comes in a international version (using a CN firmware is a huge risk for what I can say...)

Moreover what you pays on major brands is the software. Everyone can build a phone with good hardware, I mean Xiaomi can out-source the display from Samsung Display Inc. and the top performance CPU/GPU from Qualcomm, but what can't be out-sourced is software. You can use a AOSP device but it lacks of a lot of features!

For example:

• Google phones comes with an amazing camera apps... but the hardware is nothing special, all the good stuff comes from post-processing via software.
  
• Samsung phones comes with a lot of features that are not available on Android at all, often anticipating new Android releases. For example the restyling with a moder design, the Android-to-Desktop capability, single-audio-source controls!
  
• Asus phones, most likely the ROG phones, comes with feature-specific to gaming such as bypass battery on charge while gaming or variable refresh rate of the display
  

So does the chinese phones offer such features?

Another aspect regarding updates is: how much time does the OEM take to fix a critical bug. Most of major brand are very fast on patching daily-experiece break bugs... 
OnePlus (Oppo under the mask) are still affected by the low voice volume on What's App and it is a very old bug!

Speaking of Huawei, we must wait and see how USA will change the restrictions. Huawei is actually leaving Android in favor of HarmonyOS, a huge ? right now.

Followed the chain of threads and would like post my opinions here.

About HarmonyOS - This OS is more aimed at wearable devices and ioT devices rather than mobile phones.On recent watchable demos the "linking ability" is often shown.I believe their phones will still use Android as long as it is open source.

The ban on huawei really affected the ecosystem.At least it is making prices higher and the CPU change.Ans yes,selling the broad Honor.

I personally disagree the title,saying Huawei and Xiaomi are budget phones.Xiaomi surely produces budget phones when they haven't seperate the brand "Redmi".Huawei,as far as I know,have no that cheap phones that can be put into daily use for a long time.

You might heard that MI 11 is going to sell in international market.The native version costs you ¥3999(1$~6.5¥),equipped with Qualcomm 888,8GB ram+128GB rom ,100MP cameras and so on.You can call this phone a cheap one competing with other manufacturers.*
*It's reported that Motorola is going to announce a new phone for ¥1999 with scaled-down features.

For software updates,Xiaomi might be better.The current beta version is MIUI 12.5 on MI 11.However you can still upgrade your MI 8 device to a stable version of MIUI 12.Still many people enjoys MI 6.There is even a joke saying"Buy new rather than old,except for MI 6".