R&D and the fact that they had to fab the Cell processor. To think that if they had used a better G80 chip and a simpler cpu, this situation would have turned out differently. The blu-ray drives and cpus were the actual expensive part in the PS3. http://cl.ly/0I3n0L3o230J
BOM thats been kicking around Beyond3d and a few other places pegs the PS4 at around $300. Technically that is higher than what Sony would contract by a bit. So let’s imagine they are willing to sell the system around break even at launch to capture a lot of the marketshare if Microsoft is going $299 with contract.
