I think any lower than $699 would have just led to more problems and less money, this is the very first 7nm processing chip anyones sold to consumers so we can't expect yields or production to be as seemless as usual, supply is probably not much better than OG Vega was. Meanwhile it is priced to exactly match its competitor in the gaming sphere in older titles while outperforming it in newer ones, with less of a penalty from 4K and higher resolutions and more "future proofing" with increased VRAM and compute performance over its competitor.
For a card primarily made for enterprise workloads and sold for content creation that would be a more than comfortable position to have in the gaming sphere, given this isn't the main target for selling these. I'd still expect price cuts eventually, but this clearly isn't meant to be a price/perf gaming card (Though no top end card is really nowadays, far too much money elsewhere for large dies).
AMD were selling this as the most technologically advanced GPU on market and in many ways it is, but it doesn't actually have to be for the phrase to do some marketing for them anywaw, if someone doesn't want ray tracing then there's not much the 2080 has left over Vega besides perf/watt, while its much larger die size means NVidia will probably have a harder time bringing the cost of the 2080 down than AMD would with VII(This is the first time in my memory personally that AMDs managed to match NVidia's gaming performance with smaller dies, for obvious reasons here).
