There is a limit to this game. If they become reckless in the pricing, consumer faith will be lost regardless whether there is competition around or not. Let's also remember the GTX 970 launch price was lower than the GTX 670.
That being said, I don't think the GTX 1070 will be cheap. New node (FinFET is more expensive), strained world economy, currency wars between China and the US, weak consumer spending, inflation etc. all add up to the price. But even if hypothetically speaking AMD was gone or become irrelevant, NV couldn't simple triple nilly-willy the price of their products because lulz we can. No. Are they opportunistic? Sure, but they're not that recklessly stupid to ruin their business.
My post specifically mentions keeping 1070 in the sweet spot but raising the price on the 1080. In order to justify that, you increase the performance delta even further between the 1070 and 1080. Alternative way to look at it is take Kepler generation where mid-range was 660Ti/670/680. Take 670 and cut that out completely, relabel 660Ti SKU as 1070. Now look at the performance between $499 680 and $299 660Ti ~ about 25-26% (120 vs. 95 at 1600p)
https://www.techpowerup.com/mobile/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_660_Ti_Direct_Cu_II/28.html
So now that you have created a 23-26% performance gap, what you are going to do is raise the price of each card.
680 = $499 -> becomes 980 at $549 -> becomes 1080 at $599
660Ti = $299 -> you raise that to $349-399 and instead of calling it 1060Ti, you call it 1070.
With this strategy you maximize profits, use marketing to fool people into thinking they are buying a 1070, when it's just a 660Ti successor.
Then in the future, you have room to refresh both the 1080 with higher clocks and faster GDDR5X, and launch a true 1070 that you can call 1075 or 1070Ti or whatever, launch in 2017.
The point I am trying to make is, when AMD started dropping random nomenclature/marketing names on R9 380/380X or 390/390X, NV also started doing the same. We all know 960 is not a real x60 series card.
How do you explain that 780 was based on a cut-down flagship die, then 780Ti is a fully unlocked die, but this gen 980 is a mid-range die and 980Ti is a cut-down flagship die? (Aka 980Ti is a GTX570 successor more or less). All it is is a game of marketing played masterfully. And why is it done? It's very simple --> spread out a generation into parts, maximize profits at each path/part. Both AMD and NV are now playing this game. 390/390X jacked up prices $100+ over 290/290X.
So my point is, I don't care if they call Card A 1070 and Card B 1080, or X70 and X80. The truth will come out once we see the performance delta, die sizes, GDDR5 vs. GDDR5X mix, etc. Unfortunately, PC gamers have 3 second memory so if 1080 beats 1070 by 20-25%, they'll defend this scenario as if this was the norm for 20 years.
The better question to ask is why wouldn't NV do it if Vega 11 is 6+ months away? The only people who can change the industry are consumer buying habits, not NV trying to maximize profits and margins by creating an even bigger gap between a 1070 and 1080 to justify raising prices on both
I already called it day 1 when NV basically doubled the price of most SKUs with Kepler (560Ti -> 680), then I called it for them to increase it again with Maxwell (980 went to $550, $350 GTX570 ~ 980Ti went to $650). Now, they can move each card level 1 SKU up such that 660Ti becomes 1070 but still looks awesome by delivering ~980Ti performance for "only" $349-399 (remember I said $299 660Ti ~ 580 = a fully unlocked flagship).
What it means is on paper, the huge performance increase from 40nm Fermi to 28nm Kepler would be akin to 1060Ti matching the Titan X (GTX 580 3GB), while 670 easily beating the 580 would imply 1070 would beat the Titan X. That means a TRUE 1070, a true successor to the 670 has to beat the Titan X or NV low balled by design to maximize profits and spreading the performance over 2017 GP104 refreshes OR 1070 is only a 1070 in marketing name OR NV messed up royally with Pascal and 16nm node. I am not the type who believes in NV messing up based on their perfectly executed milking strategy from 2012 to 2016. Know what I mean.....Vega 11 MIA, NV has a small Polaris 10 against them.....sets a perfect scenario for profit maximization via brand name manipulation.
Another possibility is lower power usage of 1070/1080 cards to leave headroom for their refreshes in 2017. However, I don't buy that since NV set TDP arbitrarily on 970/980 anyway and no one cared.