Admittedly, I don't really know how you guys view the other Texas schools, and applied my own perception, which is --- small time, nobodies.
99% of all the Aggies I know view Texas Tech and the other schools as a bunch of nobodies. If you think A&M has done nothing, you're not really wrong, but TTech has really done NOTHING. A&M has won 18 conference championships and 1-3 MNC (depends on whose counting). Tech wasn't even in the SWC until maybe the 70's or something, and they never won either it or the Big 12. I think they tied for the South Division once, the 2008 year where them and Texas and OU all tied.
Lubbock is so far away for a lot of Texans that it's literally like driving 2-3 states away for everybody except people who live on the far West reaches of DFW. It's about a 11-12 hour drive from my house to Lubbock to put it in perspective, and I live near Houston. I'd guesstimate it's almost as far to drive there from Austin. The landscape is horrendous, nothing but flatlands and irrigated crops as far as the eye can see, but not pretty like parts of the Midwest. More like a brown dusty vastness.
Academically, they offer a lot. Law degrees, engineering, arts, a really good option for those looking to attend a big State University not named A&M or Texas. I heard it's not hard to get in, so a lot of wanna be Texas and A&M people end up going there when they don't get in. And they really seem to have a chip on their shoulder about it, and when either Texas or A&M visits there the crowd literally goes bonkers and really weird things happen there. Look up the goal post incident from maybe 2002 or 2001 when A&M played there, and countless times Texas and OU have played there and lost under suspicious circumstances.
The strange thing is that they had a really good thing going with Mike Leach, and he really had them on a different level, and they fired him for what I'd call stupid reasons.
TCU and the rest (Baylor, SMU) have had a little history behind them at times. Baylor has won several conference titles, as has TCU. SMU is more infamous. I still have no idea how they got themselves invited to the ACC, even in a diminished ACC.