You do realize that not every card on the market is throttling right? A big part of the throttling is going to be case temps and ambient temps. Everyone has a different opinion of what "loud" is, but if you have heard a 1080 at full 100% fan speed, it's not obnoxiously loud by any means. It's not nearly as noisy as the 980ti is by any means.
Also, you don't need to do modifications for it to run as advertised. If you drop the card in, it will do exactly what it's supposed to do, run at its base clock 24/7, and BOOST to the highest clock that it can while keeping temps at reasonable levels. The majority of people buying a 1080 FE im sure will have the general knowledge to be able to download an app to increase fan speeds if they would like the higher boost clocks to stay under 100% gpu load.
What most people aren't realizing though is that very few things are going to be putting these 1080s under 100% gpu load 100% of the time. So for the masses, this card is going to be wonderful, FE or non FE. Personally I am waiting out for the non FE cards because I don't need a blower style card and until I water cool my 1080 later on down the road, I would rather have an AIB cooler instead of a blower cooler and they are cheaper.
As far as it costing an extra 100 dollars, that is completely fine for nvidia to do. There is a HUGE demand for these video cards all around the world. The people wanting to pay 699 to 1000 for FE cards so they can have them sooner then vendor cards by all means are more than happy to. The cooler might not be the BEST on the market, but nvidia isn't in the cooling solution game. They are in the chip making game and money making game.
It was a smart move by nvidia to release a founders edition card, with a blower style cooler that will work extremely well for a lot of people. It's not like when you slap the card in a machine and put it under intensive loads it slows to a crawl and can't handle the load. It simply lowers/fluctuates the boost clocks to keep everything in line. Nvidia is also releasing new drivers to help out with fan settings as well and im sure there will be plenty of other things coming out to help the FE cards.
In the end, this card is absolutely amazing. I am not a fan boy of any particular company. I always make informed decisions and buy the video card that is going to give me the best fps in the games that I play period. If AMD had a card out right now that would beat the 1080 in the majority of titles I would buy it, even if I had to increase the fan speed.
Most people don't actually realize what pascal has actually achieved as they are just looking at it for an upgrade in fps. All of the other things that it has achieved get forgotten about because "oh its fast". Great, im glad it's fast but the fact that it will be able to support multiple monitor setups without stretching the sides out is amazing. The fact that ansel exists is amazing. The fact that they improved SLI is huge. The fact that they did so much work on VR is amazing. All of the things that pascal has achieved is truly amazing. It might not be the best price/performance. It might still need a few things worked out, but regardless its performance and capability are second to none currently.