I think now it is more about the hype, a lot of those people probably don't even know what they are buying. Rather than researching alternatives, they are just pulling the trigger on what they missed out on at the liquidated price.
Insight had it for $450(16) and $570(32) IIRC.
I work at a fairly large privately-owned electronics/appliance store. Employees were given notice yesterday that our store had a stock of Touchpads, and we were finally authorized to sell them at the firesale prices, which were available to employees. Within 20 minutes of the email going out, the entire stock was sold out, I think entirely to employees. On my way past the ruckus, I overheard this conversation between a random guy in repair department and a Touchpad purchaser.
Random guy: What's the deal with that thing? I saw the rush, is it that good?
Touchpad guy: I have no idea. But it's a $500 tablet for $100.
I'd venture a guess that maybe a quarter of the people knew what they were buying, the rest just followed the hype generated by our fast-moving gossip machine. I expect the other three-quarters to be selling them on ebay w/i the month....these are people that are not buying to root, won't know to download the available OS patches, and were generally expecting to get an "iPad" for 20% of that gadget's normal price, and will be quite disappointed when they find out webOS is not all that.
I have no doubt that there will be a large second-hand market for these in the near future.