If they've dropped prices in anticipation of Kepler, then it's only to maximise sales of the 7970 in the short term. From reports, Kepler should be at the same level if not a bit better than the AMD 7xxx series, it's just it will be a few months before they come out. And there is already intense interest in the 7970, I think the sales will be OK anyway, the main thing holding them back imo is more likely to be that people already upgraded recently to the nVidia GTX 5xx or AMD 6xxx series of cards, so a new upgrade might not be worth it. Of course many will also wait for Kepler, makes sense as nVidia did really well with the last gen of GPUs, the expectation is on them to deliver I suppose.