Advantage are:
- it runs off an 90W ac adapter and requires very little power (around 20W) to operate. Desktop requires 400W psu which may or may not work when you buy it.
- because of its small footprint, you can attach this at the back of your monitor with the given bracket to even hide it from view. You cannot attach a desktop to your monitor.
- There are no spares in this. Its just one single board with cpu soldered on it. Desktop consists of multiple items like motherboard, psu, cpu, and memory. More items to worry about when buying and doing rma if anything goes wrong.
- Only thing required for it to run is memory and ssd or 2.5 hdd and an hdmi cable to connect this to the monitor.
I think Intel gives international warranty for 3 years. So if it does not work, you can just send it to Intel India (after removing the ssd and memory) and they will replace it with new one.
The ram you can check in USA itself. If it is bad it wont work out of the box. You can take your ssd to usa and install it in the NUC along with ram to see if windows runs on it. Another reason I selected this was its ease of bringing in carry bag. If you thought of bringing desktop cpu, motherboard etc in luggage, it would take up a lot of volume space in luggage. Probably even attract customs duty.
If you still prefer to buy from India, go ahead.
For your use its not overkill. This is a 7th gen Intel laptop processor. Usually if you were to run any linux OS on it like Ubuntu, you could get by with 4-8GB of memory. Not with Windows 10. You'll need minimum 8 GB for windows 10 for a desktop processor. Since this processor is weaker than a desktop processor, I advised 16GB memory since you plan to use this for another few years. This can even play 4K movies with ease. Does what a desktop can do in less power.
If you're still not satisfied, you can ask other members to chime in with another desktop config. No worries.