RTX4000 has only seen the high end and ethusiast announcement, its almost certain that a 4060/4060Ti and even 4070 will be much cheaper and at the same time offer performance in the high-end Ampere range
Actually, they have already shown the 4070 and 4060Ti cards, they just put the 4080 sticker on both of them. I mean just look at the die size and TFLOP difference to the 4090 and compare them to previous gens.
Die Size:
AD102 equals GA102, AD103 equals GA104 and AD104 equals GA106. The die size differs ~5%, but last gen the smaller chips were sold as 3070 and 3060Ti, now they are both 4080s.
I am quite sure similar area usage can be seen in older generations as well between the three largest chips and the performance class they have been sold for.
TFLOPS:
Then then there are the TFLOP differences between 4090 and the 4080 cards. An 80-class card has never been so weak in performance compared to the "top-tier", in the past they delivered around 80% of the top-tier's TFLOPs.
A ~20% performance difference as seen between the two 4080s was also classified at least one if not even two tiers lower in the past, but now this should be the same performance level.
Just for comparison, the 4080 16GB only delivers 59% of the TFLOPs of the 4090, which is in line with previous 70-tier cards (55-60% of the top-tier). So we have a 70-class card (sub 500$ btw) priced at 1199$ now, because Nvidia put a 4080 sticker on it.
And the same thing goes on with the 4080 12GB, it only delivers 48.5% of the TFLOPs of the 4090. A similar performance gap can be seen at 1060Ti, 2060 and 3060Ti. So it uses a comparable die size to these chips and has a comparable performance target as these sub 400$ cards , but Nvidia calls it 4080 and adds a 899$ premium price tag on it.
And those TFLOP numbers are even in favor of the 40 series, because it takes the 4090 as top-tier, despite it already took probably the biggest cut of to the full chip for a 90 or 2nd best tier card, the others are compared to the full chip 90Ti, 80Ti or TITANs of that generation, which ever was the fastest.