I've been running a complete ELX setup now for about a year and a half... doing everything from side-stage at a small outdoor festival to up to 125 or so people at small size clubs with my 2 bands.
2 ELX115Ps for the mains
1 ELX118P for the sub
4 ELX112Ps for monitors
We've been extremely happy with the cost to performance ratio of this setup. They do get hot, but I haven't had any thermal issues yet. The IEC power cables do have a tendancy to get loose over time. I've solved this with 1 wrap of etape on the connector, also.. the knobs had a tendency to fall off over time... which after I set everything at as close to unity as I could figure out, I just took off and store in a ziplock in my road kit.
For you guys who are thinking that you can only put 4 of these on a 20a circuit, that's definitely not the case... may nights, I run the entire pa (all 7 cabinets) off of one 20a circuit. I have electrical monitoring that we've brought along with too (monitors individual circuits)... our entire draw for the PA side was roughly 800 watts, add in my small FOH setup, and we were right around 1300 watts, or just a bit under 10 amps peak draw.
as far as the finish goes, a black sharpie or paint pen will go a long way keeping them look nice. but really for $600/cabinet you can't complain too much.
My vocalists are extremely happy with the sound from the 12's too... no complaints there, and so much better than the old wedges we had. (SX200s on a CE1000)
One note, that saved our butts one night.. our mixer failed mid show... since the EV's have 2 built-in Mic-Pres, we were able to plug the vocal mics directly into the first cabinet, and daisy chain the rest to finish out the show... not ideal, but.. the show must go on. Try that with your separate amps and cabs.