I can't be certain about the LE variant of the newer Radeon cards, but when the original Radeon range appeared, the Radeon LE was an OEM design intended for SE Asia only - it was basically the Retail 32MB DDR card, underclocked by about 10% and with the HyperZ disabled in order to further hurt 3D performance. (It was about half the price). ATI never intended for the LE to hit the US market, but apparantly the original Asian deal for these cards fell through and as a result they ended up being sold on the net, and consequently a lot of them ended up in the US. The fact that someone worked out how to flash them to restore the HyperZ buffer and to reclock them to retail speed meant that they were a good seller. The HTPC crowd liked them in particular because they didn't have the noisy fan on the chipset that the retail version had.

That being said - ATI got burned with that experience. The availability of $90 LE cards hurt sales of their retail cards in the US. They'd have to be really dumb to make that mistake again. But who knows?

In case you are wondering: HTPCers liked the Radeon chipset because of its 10 bit DACs that allow for video calibrations without losing any range or resolution - something that no other chipset had. I don't know whether this has changed in the past year though.