Are they supposed to be this bad? Serious.

I was given a seventeen inch Blackstone griddle for Christmas this year, and I was excited to fire it up and use it to make some killer breakfasts. Maybe my expectations were too high, because what I got was thoroughly underwhelming. It took more than fifteen minutes for the range to get hot enough to turn water to steam, and almost five minutes for me to scramble an egg. Pork chops that I expected to take forty minutes to cook, max, took well over an hour. At it's highest setting, the Blackstone still didn't get anywhere near as hot as my twenty year old electric stove, and my $20 propane camping stove blows it out of the water.

Is this normal? Is this what tabletop Blackstones are supposed to be like? Because, I'd currently rate this somewhere below a George Foreman grill as far as performance and versatility go. I couldn't even cook bacon on it. I tried and failed to make a grilled cheese. Why do people sing this thing's praises to the sky?