The small production run coupled with the price suggests that it's basically an evaluation board in a laptop form factor. As-is, it's probably mostly of use for people that want to hack on RISC-V (operating systems, ports, application development...) with a hardware target that can also act as a standalone host computer for said hacking on the go.

The Pinebook Pro uses off-the-shelf A53 cores that have existed for over a decade.

... which are significantly slower than the U74 present in the JH7110 SoC.

As Star64 is a thing, I am hopeful a Pinebook refresh will be RISC-V.

I imagine it's because Alibaba does not and will never have the purchasing agreements like HP/Dell/Apple/Lenovo do. I'd guess the secondary components that complete the laptop come at a premium, jacking up the retail price.

You can probably find equally overpriced ARM and x86 laptops if you are willing to look for them.

It turns out, there is not much competition in the RISCV Laptop market.

And that, in a nutshell, is why we can't have nice things.