£1k is quite a jump but if you get more standard kit, I guess it makes little difference anyway. The Union Jack lights suit the brand but could definitely be seen as a bit tacky. No doubt we'll see more and more cars with customised lights in the future though, as all the fancy lights out there seem to be produced by one or two companies, so obviously they've just created new technology for things like this.
My previous gen MINIs were terrible on reliability (R56 etc) so hopefully the later generation, and the 2018 are better in that dept.