Month late but – your point is well taken. I was (wrongly) lumping PR people – who I actually know to care about interaction and organic product growth – with marketing people, who often confuse appearance with actual positive impact.
I’d definitely tend to agree with you – though I think a likely scenario is one similar to the PS3’s launch – there will be a model equivalent to the 20GB PS3 (stripped down – only 2 USB ports and no card reader! Sounds familiar) at $299, then the one everyone who cares wants, which will probably run $399 – most likely with a bundled game and a second controller.
Sony still bore a massive portion of the development costs of the Cell processor – their use of it in other products was an attempt to amortize some of that expense.
Also, the Cell was massively expensive to fab in 2006 – it has only come down in price through the die shrinks that made the Slim/Super-Slim possible.
