If it's really BOM cost, it will come down after the crash (which cannot now be long postponed). If it's other things besides BOM cost, it's an opening for someone to make a better clone.
I don't think they will survive unless they ship it with some in-house RAM, which I doubt it will be cheap. Time to go for PC133 SDRAM which is useless for data centers but very useful for all the other tasks.