Yeah. It's better then the Marquee in most ways I can think of. Stock clock speeds are faster and it also comes with ICS. The screen while mostly the same size, it runs at a slightly higher resolution then the Marquee. Only thing the Marquee really beats this one on is that the Marquee is thinner and has a 2 mega pixel front camera while the HTC phone has a 1.3 mega pixel camera. The rear cameras for both phones are the same in specs though.
Thanks to zombu2 who edited the zip file I found, there is now a CWM installer that roots the phone without any hassle. Since it's not using an exploit, it's mostly update proof so long as the bootloader remains unlocked.
Heck I just installed the latest update they just released. It required stock recovery since ota updates won't install via custom recovery roms. So after installing the OTA update. Root didn't work anymore. But since the boot loader was unlocked, I just flashed CWM back, then re-ran the root installer zip and root was back to it's former glory.
I'm not sure if the Marquee even has a boot loader but the HTC one can be unlocked via the official HTC website. How nice of them.
You should think about trying to get into developing for this phone. We certainly need more dev members over there.
If you don't use Boost Mobile as your phone carrier, you will obviously have better phones to choose from. Perhaps a bad ESN Evo will show up on ebay one day and you can get it real cheap to play with.