They're
specifying (PDF warning)
16 level grayscale, and a refresh rate of .4 to 1.1 seconds, with a stroke delay of 20 ms per segment for writing, in other words 8.1 diagonal inches of
Gen 2 e-ink, so the cost scale may be slightly different that what you've seen. Of course, I have no idea if you've seen any details on Gen 1 vs. Gen 2, so there you go.
Add to that half a dozen possible input methods, and 8 different listed apps, about half of which I believe are fairly unique to the medical arena, as well as HIPAA compliance -- this isn't just WinMobile/IE repackaged.
And for all that we still haven't really begun to get into all the details in the specs.
Really, I'm not sure how much it matters what they charge, if the target customers will pay the asking price, then well and good, if not, then they'll have to deal with
that. For the rest of us, it's not what we're after in the first place (so the device
itself isn't really relevant to us), but it has the side effect of increasing the overall e-ink demand, which should hurry cost/price declines on the stuff, which is a good thing.