I'm not going to instantly foam at the mouth and start spamming "ROFL GET HD 5xxx", in this case I'd say that Nvidia did make a performance monster with the GTX 480 with it's own implications (Heat/Power/Noise) but seriously, for those of you who are flailing about and bawwing over the heat/noise did you ever hear of WATER COOLING!? I'm no Nvidia fanboy but the issues can easily be fixed with a moment of thinking.
The GTX 480 is something, that if you have the money for, go for it. It beat the HD5870 and got the crown for single-GPU performance while being cheaper than a HD 5970 so I'd say it filled the gap between the HD 5870 and HD 5970. While, if personally given a choice I'd rather go for the GTX 480 than the HD 5870 if I could get one for free (rofl someone would kill me first though), slap on some water cooling and tada, I have a silent and effective cooler. Just replace my PSU but that's just a small price to pay for the performance monster that card is.
Though in reality, I'd most likely end up buying a HD 5750 due to the prices and such. So really, if Gigabyte make this card somewhat cheaper than the GTX 480, they might be on to something here considering that the shader clock is just slightly slower and it'd be cheaper than a standard GTX 480.
Although probably everything I said would go to waste and I'll most likely get -20 for actually trying to be somewhat unbiased but anyway, just chucked in my 2 cents here.