Considering Vista Home Premium OEM is $140 compared to $240 retail, we can expect Windows 7 Home Premium OEM to be somewhere in the $100-$120 range.
Vista Business is $180 OEM compared to $300 retail, so Windows 7 Business will probably be $180 as well, maybe a little cheaper if were lucky.
And Vista Ultimate is also $180 OEM compared to $320 retail, so Windows 7 Ultimate OEM will probably be $180 as well, give or take $10.
Overall I don't think the pricing is too bad at all. You have to remember that Windows is Microsoft's biggest product and is where Microsoft makes a large amount of it's money. Where as OS X from Apple, isn't really Apple's main product. It's just part of a family of products which come together as the Apple experience. Apple makes it's profits off of the entire Apple experience which includes a whole bunch of different Apple products. Apple doesn't intend to make large profits off of selling OS X so it can afford to sell it really cheap, where as Microsoft DEPENDS on making profits off of selling Windows. So obviously Windows will always cost more than OS X versions.
They also didn't mention in this article that pre-orders for Windows 7 start tomorrow, and it is a lot cheaper on pre-order. It is only $50 for Windows 7 Home Premium on pre-order, and $100 for Windows 7 Business on pre-order. You can tell that Microsoft is trying to make the tech savy early adopters happy by offering very cheap pre-order prices. They're hoping that by keeping the tech savy happy their general image of Windows 7 will be that it is a good operating system, and this image will spread out to average consumers as well. Because in Vista's case, the average consumers just heard from their tech buddies that "Windows Vista sucks!" so they just kept repeating it so that they could sound like they knew what they were talking about, even though they had no idea why some people actually thought that Vista sucked (which it didn't but that's a whole different debate).
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