I'm wondering if 10G really will become economical any time soon (for consumer products).

It's been around a long time now, much longer than 1Gb was around until it started becoming consumer products. 10Gb still uses quite a lot of power, and consumer demand is virtually absent since the 10x speed we got from 100Mb to 1Gb has been "fast enough" for home users, and will be for many years.

Well, technically you can now get into 10Gb for around $150 per port. http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-12-Port-ProSafe-Gigabit-Switch...

Which is my point, this is well over an order of magnitude more expensive than what the 1Gb consumer switches people would buy for home use.

Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'affordable'. 10G is now affordable for small businesses, when up until recently it was strictly the domain of the large datacenter. I wouldn't put it in my house yet, but I see no reason to assume that 10G copper switches won't get to that price point eventually.

you must factor in the sfp+ module, around $200. So a complete port would be $350, $700 for a point to point link. Thunderbolt is cheaper

No, that switch is 10G copper, no sfp+ required. Thunderbolt and 10G ethernet aren't really competing in the same space, so I'm not sure why you brought it up.

Anything over fibre or non standard cabling is likely to remain expensive for quite some time. 2.5Gb is about the limit of cheap alas for a long time.

Fibre is not required to beat the 2.5Gb/s limit. Standard copper Cat 6a cables already support 10Gb/s for distances up to 100m.

If people have 6A and you use a large amount more power. For an application like a hard drive the power consumption of the ethernet connection would be more than the rest of the system probably.

So use twinax.

Which goes back to "non standard cabling is likely to remain expensive for quite some time".