Wow, the comments are bugged here. I never hit "submit" and it posted those words when I clicked "log in" at the top of the screen. FFS Tom's, please fix this.
At any rate, I AM also underwhelmed. Wasn't tessellation/n-patches supposed to be "the new big thing" in DirectX 8? I remember hearing nVidia boasting about it and Morrowind back in like 2002. Then it was boasted about in DX 9. Then 9.0c. Then DirectX 10. Then DirectX 10.1. And now DirectX 11? I just skip over it when I see it.
Yes, it does all look good, but the price for the 5870 is a little hard to swallow. I guess $260US for a 5850 is somewhat acceptable, though, but seeing that you can get a pair of 4850s for less than $200US now... It might be a little bit of a hard sell, especially when a single 4850 or 4870 is plenty enough for most that don't have a CrossFire-capable board.
As far as the GTX 300 series, is there anything even known about them? I started to have some shaken faith in nVidia when I saw a comment from them along the lines of "GPGPU is the future for high-end GPUs, not gaming." If they really believe that, I have my doubts that as a card, the GT300 series will be competitive with the 5800 series. nVidia just might go with a smaller GPU that will only be relatively incremental over the GTX 285, compared to the roughly doubling we saw with the 5800 vs. the 4800.