I agree, it will probably be more expensive. Don't take the $600 price tag too much at face value, I think he was only trying to convey that the ATi cards give better value and don't cost a fortune. I mean, you gotta admire a card (8500) that can compete with cards that are 50% more expensive than it.
Call it hope, call it pure speculation, call it what you will, I have a strong feeling that ATi will continue its pattern of what it has always done and that is release video cards with good value as well as good speed. I also see ATi as having the advantage for the next couple months until the nv30 comes out. This is because it will probably have the fastest card available (meaning you can hold it in your hands, buy it from a store, and actually use it) for a while until the nv30 comes out.
Finally, I believe the age where next generation technology doubled speed of current technology is far behind us. You should be used to enthusiastic powerpoint presentations whose only visible purpose is to get investors (and end users) excited. I hope the nv30 will perform as well as people claim but I have a feeling we may only see a 25-30% increase in performance for the first batch of nv30 cards. I believe that the true selling point of the nv30 will be its directx9 support, video decoding, tv out, software, and other features. You have to notice that there is a general trend towards features, price, and quality. These are the things that will actually get people to buy the newer cards and that's why they are selling these features as benefits to users.
And in all of this mess, unfortunately our newbie to the realm of fast graphics, Matrox, kind of gets forgotten and pushed aside. The Parhelia seems completely built on the idea that quality is usually better than framerate. What is curious to me is the fact that I recently downloaded 3rd party nvidia drivers and they really helped image quality in a few games. What this speaks to me is that in the future I believe we will have an even greater diversification of video cards, and that it will be progressively harder and harder to say which is the "best" for someone. Whatever the personality or uniqueness of a buyer, for each graphics card there is a user-type whom I could see benefiting from one card more than another. So the graphics market is becoming more like a niche market that may in fact have more room for Matrox than people assume, because there are still the large systems distributors that Matrox has always scored with in the past, and the people who care totally about image quality over any kind of speed bonus.
Falling down stairs saves time 
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