I still suggest that high performance CARDS are used for mining, residual and power consumption are better than normal, and maybe 5 years later, you can still play games.
At the moment investing into GPU's for mining is expensive thing. Also with everything that is going on (price drop and rise of difficulty), getting your investment money back through mining would take really long time. But I agree with you, high end cards would always be better choice. Unlike ASIC miners, GPU's will always be easier to sell and thus return some portion of your investment. Selling GPU's is easier simply because more people uses them, and because of that market is bigger. There are some properties that GPU's have which ASIC miners don't.