I had a Hi Point 9mm carbine. It was a good gun overall. Pretty reliable, though it did have a couple jams on the feed ramp. It's easy to clear though. The magazines are junky and probably caused the occasional jams that my gun had. It definitely looked and felt cheap, but for the price I expected that. A major upside is the lifetime warranty. If anything ever breaks you can just send it back to them and they will do all repairs at no charge. The only reason I don't have the carbine now is because I traded it for a shotgun I wanted more.
I have heard not so great things about their pistols though. I did some reading up before I bought the carbine and apparently those are much more reliable than the pistols. This was back around 2008 though, so that may have changed.
For the price I guess you can't go wrong, but I would kind of consider them throwaways. Since they aren't your only pistols, there's nothing wrong with that.