I've also had good experiences importing motherboards from Russia, Ukraine, etc. Packaging was not always ideal, but never got any damaged items.
Regarding the import taxes applied by customs to these types of items in many countries with the "protect local business" excuse, it is basically a legal scam by the governments to keep the pockets of the customs officers full of money. Here in South America customs officers are disgustingly corrupt and will assign an arbitrarily high price to items to either make you pay a ridiculous sum or just keep your stuff. Politicians adore protectionism over here and they apply it over and over again despite it always being a failure, I guess that lobbying and bribing by crummy local "businessmen" is too hard to resist (Argentina and Brazil are the worst examples).
I guess I'm lucky that my country allows full tax exemption on a few packages per year up to USD 200 each, but still had a few run-ins with customs officers regarding the price of some packages... once I imported a box with a few Roland MIDI modules from Japan, took me a while to get that one out of there but luckily the customs assholes were unable to understand what these things were, and the freight forwarder in Japan had marked a low price on the package.