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That seems like an ahistorical objection.

$199 was a very reasonable price for a powerful dev tool in 1988. A lot of software at the time cost much, much more. Look up historical prices for just about any contemporaneous commercial software.

You can still argue they would have done better in the long run by marketing themselves as "Turbo Smalltalk" at $69.99. But that's a different argument than "wow that's way overpriced," which simply wasn't the case.

"The list price is $150 each for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and for a bundle containing both Turbo Assembler and Turbo Debugger."

p8 October 1988 https://books.google.com/books?id=WSBVAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA18-PA8

Smalltalk/V 286 included source-code debugger, bit mapped WIMP for MS-DOS, BitBlt graphics, … Turbo Pascal + debugger already cost more.

And … ?

Dec 1988, MS Word 5.0 for MS-DOS, $450.

Adobe products can cost that much on a yearly basis.