No, it isn't. That the previous pricing structure was horrid does not make this great.
If you bought a 5850 five years ago for $259 you're still at the performance level of a $100 260X. Historical perspective? 4 years from 1998 to 2002 saw you go from a Voodoo 2 to the Radeon 9000 Pro. So something like 10x the performance (if you can even compare something that'll do 1600x1200 32 bit color to something that maxes out at 800x600 [1024x768 if SLI'ed] 16 bit) at 1/3rd the price.
If you are only looking at raw performance, and your frame of reference is the ancient times when GPUs were immature technology and explosive progress was not only possible but expected, I doubt you'll ever again consider the GPU market to be in a great place. I'm going with more realistic expectations and looking at more factors.
Look at the 970. It's a well balanced piece of hardware that simultaneously provides a nice jump both in price/performance and power/performance compared to what we had before, and is not pricy in absolute terms. It conforms quite well to standard APIs and virtually any game will run properly on it. The feature set, with stuff like the new programmable sampling features and HDMI 2.0, is a large jump forward and there is no indication of new features emerging any time soon which would obsolete the card in a significant way. Furthermore, there will not be new high end game consoles for many years to come, so requirements aren't going to jump drastically. Buying a GPU like this today is essentially risk-free, it will have huge staying power, and the total package is much better than what you'd have gotten for the same money six months ago. I don't see how this can be called anything but great for the buyer.
You can't actually say a lot of those things about the 1998-2002 period. Performance progress was very fast, yes, but various incompatibility problems were all over the place, and you ran the risk of buying a GPU that would be made nearly obsolete next week by the announcement of a new one.