I've never seen a broken wheel. It's a remarkably rare occurnce and, this is just speaking from personal experience, I've found it better to drive around potholes than to drive through them. If you're vigilant those pesky potholes won't surprise you when they jump out in front of you.
Besides, you act as if one only has a choice between a horribly cheap knockoff and a $600 Volk wheel. There are a million options between the two that will perform so close to the Volks that he would likely not be able to discern a difference.
Justify it any way you want but, aesthetics aside, the benefit of running one wheel over another drops dramatically as price differences increase.
It's not likely that he'd be able to tell a performance difference between a TE37 and something similar, but heavier and cheaper, so the only reason left for buying them is the name. It doesn't make sense to remove the name and thus have that wheel blend in with the cheaper options, UNLESS theft is a concern.
This is the same as someone trying to justify the difference between $600 speaker cables and $200 speaker cables.