Rajeev for such bold accusations though as to the reasoning of the rest of the forum, your own logic is flawed. Now leaving the whole debate as to the actual price point behind us, I think you paint too broad a stroke when it comes to manufacturing expenses. Certainly a delay in the onset of manufacturing will probably benefit the initial cost to produce Sony will face, but you seem to bring economies of scale into the picture in a slightly inappropriate way. Truthfully I have to say that Sony will be producing no more or no less than they would have been producing before this: as many as they can non-stop once manufacturing begins. What does it matter if you have a production run of - say - 3 million, and you start selling those consoles after the 1 millionth one has been produced vs the 3 millionth? The advantage here is the advantage of certain technologies possibly being more mature when manufacturing begins, not any advantage of scale. Stockpiling doesn't reduce costs to manufacture, and the cost per unit is still what it is. The first units produced will be more expensive than the units produced later on; date of sale will not effect those manufacturing costs once manufacturing has begun.
Now Blu-ray. I think you're also taking this much too lightly. That $100 price difference we're throwing up has nothing to do with R&D, it has to do with higher component prices. Diodes, OPUs, etc... It's just plain more expensive to make a Blu-ray drive than another sort at this point, and R&D costs should be left off the table for BOMs anyway, as they have no place there.
I'm not saying that $399 isn't plausible for a whole 'nother set of reasons, but if you were making your estimate before based on the number of units produced before launch and/or the ephemeral R&D costs of Blu-ray not being material, you may want to reassess.
