Prices includes VAT. And its 882$ with VAT.
Your point about taxes always misses the mark because as a consumer I cannot legally evade taxes. What it costs me to actually buy the card is what matters to me. If my country had 20%, 30%, 50% import/sales tax, that's what it would actually cost me to buy the card.
Right now this is what I am going to pay for a 1080 if I bought one:
(
$909.99 + $12 shipping) *1.13 tax / 1.30811 FX rate =
$796 USD
There is no point discussing that VAT/taxes are included to try to obfuscate that I am being asked by NV to pay $800 USD for a next gen
upper-mid-range 256-bit GDDR5X 314mm2 card. I don't find this acceptable knowing what happened with GTX980 -> 980Ti. There are also rumours that NV already tapped out the entire Pascal stack which means GP102 is ready to go in 2017 as soon as NV has milked the 1080. If I am spending $800 USD+ per a single card, at that point nothing less than AMD's/NV's true flagships of that generation will be satisfactory to me.
Canada Computers that has
32 stores in my province has
0 cards for sale. The
only AIB card they have for pre-order isn't worth buying due to 5+1 VRM power phases and a single 8-pin connector.
Same story at NCIX Canada. 0 cards in stock, 0 AIB cards worth buying.
I found
6 FE cards in the city of Calgary at Memory Express. Every other 1080 is OOS and that includes the
only AIB card worth buying at this store.
While it's not absolutely impossible to buy 1080 cards, the stock is pretty limited. Most importantly, imho FE card isn't worth buying even for $599 USD ($796 USD for us Canadians) since it'll run hotter, louder, has no 0 dBA idle fan operation and will on average overclock worse due to insufficient heatsink (unless one runs the fans at 80-100%). Right now, there are almost no good AIB cards for sale yet.
It's clear that NV rushed this launch. When MS/Sony/Nintendo do console launches, they spend 3-4 months building inventory so that once the first several batches of cards sell out, they can restock tens of thousands of more units on a daily basis. Compared to how those companies launch highly anticipated consoles, this launch is underwhelming as far as inventory management goes.
At the same time, some Russian YouTubers have been told that RX 480 won't show up in major Moscow stores until August. This suggests AMD may not fair much better with Polaris 10, but at least they have 1 month to start building up inventory to save face. Current rumoured prices for 1070 in Russia will be ~ $539 USD and for 1080 ~ $821 USD. That's
far more than what 670/680 and GTX970/980 cost when they came out.
Either way, I hate paper launches, whether it's from Intel, AMD, NV, etc. Even though Apple's products sell out on launch, at least there the demand is absolutely insane (they can easily sell tens of millions in a month), so it's more forgivable/understandable.