Well, I believe the 290X should have come in @ $499. Everyone said I was dumb and why should AMD give it away, but it was pretty obvious to me where the price had to be. All they did was leave a nice cozy pricepoint for nVidia to slip into underneath them. Like you, I've also said the 290 needs to be $399. We'll see if AMD can figure it out this time, or if they'll continue to price their new cards $50 to high.
So far, the only one they've got right is the 280X @ $299. But the market had already sorted that out for them with the 7970 pricing. They probably wished they could have priced it at $349.