I wonder how the pricing will end up. At the baseline, $1200 for a MacBook Air with 16 gigs of ram is great value for the machine you get, even compared to Windows alternatives. For the new MacBook Pros, there are multiple companies who felt that they were worth shelling out for top of the line configs outside of their normal refresh cycles. Maybe Apple will price their top of the line stuff for a reasonable price/performance ratio, or they might think that the people who actually need that config would be willing to pay sky high prices and charge accordingly.

A Mac mini starts at $699 and is more than capable (by specs, anyway) to run as a Linux workstation.