It is opinion based because it can only be answered by guesses and conjecture.
Cost of services verses cost of hardware is an incredibly difficult thing to quantify and while your question focuses purely on hardware it ignores all the support work behind that hardware. You are looking at "cost of hardware" rather than "cost of ownership", one is the initial outlay, while the other includes things like
- maintenance
- upgrades
- training (easier if everyone has the same hardware/software)
- hardware failures (more likely with 100 machines than 1)
- software updates (easier to update 1 base image than 100 full machines)
- support personnel wages
And the list goes on... it depends entirely on who is looking at it as to what that list entails and how much each stage costs. Do they buy premium hardware to offset likelihood of failures? Do you postpone updates and risk security breaches? How often do you upgrade, every year or every 5 years? What are your rollout schedules for new hardware? How do you get the hardware to people? How do you deal with downtime? How many people do you need to support 100 machines? How much are you paying those people?
A single support engineer could easily cost double your initial outlay for hardware, while that cost could be included in your "hosted" solution.
All of these things depend on you, your company, your directors, your intent. And they are all going to be opinions on the best way to deal with something at that moment, what costs each compromise takes and what benefits you might reap.
Cost of ownership isn't really a problem using computer hardware either, it is a large scale corporate problem.