Well, for starters, it is essentially a third generation product, with a couple variants in between snuck in there, so the design has had a lot of time to evolve and be tweaked. (Has not it been six years since the original was released?)
The big seller for it is its price-performance ratio, and, thanks to the huge degree of diminishing returns for cooling solutions, the price point gap is fairly narrow - $5-10 is enough to cause a serious consideration for a purchase. If it were not for the price, its popularity would be limited - when the base price went up to $40 dollars for a week or so, suddenly a lot of people started recommending the Xigmatek Gaia instead.
Its performance in indisputable, though. It is a basic, solid, effective design; 57 aluminum fins crammed onto four well-placed heatpipes, with a strong fan to ensure the job gets done. Even if it is not the most efficient design, it certainly is effective. Overall, it makes for a nice, neat, little single-tower package that can handle overclocks fairly well. How far and how extreme of an overclock it can handle is always up for debate, but, regardless, it is a stalwart product that is good enough for most buyers.
I think where the EVO falls short is the ways you can see where Cooler Master cut its corners to keep the price competitive. For starters, the fan and its sleeve bearing. I am not going to touch the subject of horizontal mounting, but, long story short, I have read too many comments about the stock fan failing or malfunctioning than I care for. Anyone who has read the basics on bearings knows that sleeve bearings, while robust in their more crude manufacture, are cheap, and even high quality sleeve bearings are more susceptible to outside factors like dust. Secondly, I keep hearing conflicting tales about the mounting system. I am not going to go into detail, but one thing that bugs me is the bracket installation does not strike me as intuitive since a lot of installation videos show botched attempts of trying to align the bracket while keeping the heatsink steady. (The manual is vague, and does not specify the best way.) In addition, I do not like how you can, to a degree, rotate the heatsink after it is installed. I know it is kind of by-product for allowing less parts/materials for a universal mounting system, but it still seems like there should be an easy way to fix it. Lastly, I think direct touch heat-pipes are a great idea; even if they do not actually improve performance, they improve efficiency by there being that much less copper you have to use. The downside is that some companies, like Thermalright and Noctua, have started making convex bases to achieve better contact (particularly with Intel CPUs, as we learned in the recent Thermal Compound round-up Tom's Hardware did). So, uh, yeah. That is how they save their money to make a very competitive product.
And pointing these "negatives" out is border-line nit-picky, like said before when discussing its performance, it is more than good enough for most users. Just because it has a sleeve bearing does not mean it will not work. It happens to work quite effectively, and although it could be improved on in some aspects most people would not be able to note the difference beyond the end result - a higher cost.
If I did not already have an aftermarket solution, I personally would not have an issue spending an extra $7 to get a Thermalright True Spirit 120M over the EVO. But, that is just me with my tastes. On the flip-side, I am eager to see how well the Hyper 212 X will do when it finally hits US markets. Even if the gain in performance is as small as it was from the 212 Plus to the 212 EVO, I wonder if the disparity with how much one is recommended over the other will be as great.
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