Guys,
you need to be careful here not to toss out the baby with the bathwater. Firstly, it is unrealistic to buy special offer items at a discount supermarket and expect them to be top notch quality. Secondly, the 14th of May was only 14 days ago. Thirdly, not everything sold under a German brand is necessarily made in Germany. I googled this lathe via google.de, and ended up on a number of websites selling them. One of them sells them under a brand named "Drechselmeister", and under that very same brand you can see lathes that are either clearly the same model as Jet or some of the Axminster lathes.
What does this mean? Simply that most likely these lathes are actually manufactured in China, albeit possibly from a European design. That's not in itself a bad thing. As George (BF) will confirm, the At1416VS lathe from Axminster is a very nice little machine, and very good value for the money. I have an engineering lathe from Warco, which was manufactured in China, and I can tell you that it is of very decent quality, especially for the money I paid for it.
All I am really looking for is somebody who has one (other than Simon, who sells them and is therefore almost obliged to praise them) to give me some honest feedback. You know, warts and all, that kind of stuff.