Man, those grills are useful. What I like about their engineering is you can run them on a typical kitchen circuit without worrying about a circuit breaker being triggered. This is not always true with other appliances. Typically stuff that can heat is very power consuming. Even washing machines and stuff like that can sometimes trip breakers (heat + spin). So yeah, it can be convenient.
They were also incredibly easy to clean. Whoever designed it was intimately aware of both the struggle of cleaning a grill grate and not being able to fit pans in dishwasher or standard kitchen sink.
The predecessors to the Salton design in the 80s suffered this problem. The hot sandwich makers and grills with no drainage had depressions that were hard to clean. They learned from the flawed competition.
