If they're marketing the tablet aspect, you'd be insane not to make the obvious comparison to a 3rd gen iPad, which goes for ~$500. The main market here isn't tech savvy, and certainly not THG readers, they don't know ARM from x86. All the care about is what it does, and if it's a tablet it's hard to sell a $1000 one running Windows versus a 3rd generation Apple product -- more generations means fewer bugs! And given Apple's dominance in the smart phone market, odds are good many of these people are somewhat familiar with or even own an iPhone and can predict how an iPad behaves. Windows 8 is totally new to them and the only preview of it is a beta which most consumers aren't knowledgeable enough to install (as a VM, which is the only sane place to try out a beta OS).
So, $1000, no. No way. $600 for ARM and a different version of Win8? If I really wanted a tablet, I'd opt for an iPad at that price.
And for those who say that of course they need to charge this, since they're not making money on a license. Really? You think that one through? If a 3rd party can pay MS for a license, pawn it off on you and turn a profit for less money, how do you possibly think MS would lose money at that same point? They don't have to pay for a license to themselves, but all hardware companies that bundle Windows have to pay them. So, the competitor's prices have a Win8 license "fee" tacked on and is what the market expects. Therefore, if they keep prices in line they actually make *more* money; they can actually undersell the competition and make more money on hardware than they currently do on licenses. It's the Apple way, and given they have more free cash than several European countries combined, I can't imagine how this strategy wouldn't work.