The catch may be just that it's Netgear. As a longtime Powershift Partner, we're ideally suited to acquire demo/eval units at discounted prices, but we really don't... I typically suggest Dell, HP, or Cisco to customers, and our own network is built heavily on Dell. Netgear makes some nice products across the spectrum, and at the desktop level I do occasionally deploy the Netgear GS108T because they're the cheapest sorta-smart switch that can do stuff like vlans and be administered remotely. But many of the Netgear owners I know are anywhere from vaguely unhappy to relatively displeased with the devices. My overall impression of the quality has been kinda poor since the '90's when we had a fleet of RT338's that started to fail right outside the warranty window, and I hear of Netgears dropping dead often enough that I'm not convinced that quality issues have been addressed to my satisfaction.
When you buy a switch from Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, etc., it is worth noting that you're buying from a company that's largely focused on consumer retail sales and keeping prices low, which typically means that they may be cutting corners on components in order to hit price points. The more "enterprisey" manufacturers are more interested in network availability, so the devices will usually cost quite a bit more, even if they don't cost a ton more to build. Sometimes they are bundled along as "freebies" with large scale server orders, but many of the buyers already have their own preferred network infrastructure and therefore they get the free switches and then turn around and eBay them for beer money. We got a bunch of switches a decade ago this way back when Dell was heavily promoting its PowerConnect series in that manner.
