well that's obviously their response, i'd even consider it a kick in the balls for AMD. for this entire year i'd book a win in nvidia's books, they had the undoubted crown for half a year before AMD could even respond, now they'll just have to do a little adjustment to keep it even till the 8xx series releases which will blast AMD once again.
i hope AMD will catch up, don't want to see them getting dominated in the GPU market as they are in the CPU market. half a year still seems like not too much of a delay to us, but atm that's half a circle late, to keep it even AMD would have had to release the 290x around june at the latest.
my guess would be this will come in slightly above the 290x, so 650-700 euros.