You don’t need to pay that much. For example, Minisforum is selling a barebones MS-01 for $399 new. This isn’t quite apples to apples — the Raspberry Pi includes RAM (but not much), whereas the MS-01 includes a case, a cooling system, a power supply, and an RTC battery. (And the MS-01 uses a non-janky 19V supply, whereas the Raspberry Pi 5 wants a weird not-to-spec not-quite-sure-what-they-were-thinking 5V USB supply by default.)

For the price, you get massively more CPU power, 3x the number of easily connectable NVMe devices, at higher bandwidth each, 22x (!) the network bandwidth, and the ability to connect a real multi-lane PCIe card of your choice.

I still find it sad that NVMe is an afterthought in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. SD is convenient, but it’s also slooooow, and it holds back a lot of raspberry pi use cases. The new-to-RPi5 official NVMe support still seems really awkward in the way it interferes with the overall thermal performance and the way it interferes with the IO header if you use the official board.