No, it is competitive with the 24 SSD monster. That is, it is competitive with putting 24 of the SSDs in RAID, which is estimated to be... $12k IIRC. Granted, you get less storage space, but this is for pure IO goodness.
The database I/O benchmark results are quite interesting. Intel’s X25-E reaches 6,500 to 10,000 I/O operations per seconds at small command queue depths, but drops to a little more than 4,000 I/Os at deep command queues. The ioDrive is different. While it reaches 2.5x more performance than the X25-E at executing individual commands, it drops to a bit more than the Intel’s performance at longer command queues. Switching the ioDrive to one of the faster write modes, which results in reduced capacity, results in more than doubling I/O performance. In such a case, a RAID array of Intel X25-E SSDs could not catch up for the same cost of an ioDrive.
My point was you get (comparatively) a heck of a lot of storage plus pretty decent performance with a SSD. You better /really/ care about IO to be paying that much per GB - and some people do.
The other thing to consider is the power consumption on the X25-E RAID vs. the ioDrive. I'm not sure which is better, though I would guess the ioDrive. Someone care to look it up? ;)
Should be very interesting for "dream machine" desktops once you can boot from one.