Wade

Sure they are, and the people selling them ought to know why they should be fixed if they're going to push them effectively. Here's the long of it:

Ellipticals are a fabulously deceptive form of exercise: yes, you feel like you're working very hard–and you may well be working very hard–but the problem is that you are not replicating any sort of real life activity very well, and as a result some of the difficulty is related not to the intensity of the exercise so much as the difficulty in performing the exercise.

Think of it this way:
You have to move 200 pounds 50 feet. You are going what might be viewed as a defined amount of work to do this. That work quantity can be viewed as 10000 lb-feet. Which of these is harder:
A. Moving a perfectly round sphere of 200 pounds across a low-pile rug that is perfectly flat
or
B. Moving a refrigerator of 200 pounds with no wheels across that same floor

If those two activities were represented on the console of an elliptical machine, you would clearly see that both measured some defined number calories per hour for example, defined to be equivalent. Which is clearly preposterous because doing A is much easier than doing B for a human.

This is why as an exercise professional, I view ellipticals as a mixed bag: they wave a carrot in front of people that tells them they've burned 1000 calories in a specified period of time and they go about their day happy to consume 800 of those calories more than they do on days they don't exercise thinking they're going to lose weight–when the reality of it is that the readouts are NOT accurate. Sure, there are some people that love their elliptical workouts, but they're just damn well inaccurate. If they get people moving, great, and yeah, they do that. But the misinformation about them utterly sucks.

And so in answer to your question, yes, they really are supposed to work. If they worked it would be easier to market them because an accurate reading showing 150 bpm at a readout showing 1000 calories per hour would preferentially encourage people to jump on that comparatively easy exercise versus cranking 160 bpm to get 850 calories per hour out of a rower–which is much harder and in many ways more real-world applicable in terms of muscular development. People who don't particularly like to exercise tend to prefer the most visually efficient method of getting it done; they have no way of knowing that the information they're being given isn't right because there's very little in terms of a frame of reference.