Indeed, it is. Servers are expensive; everything built for a datacenter is expensive. It's very easy to make a passive chassis for far less than conventional datacenter gear prices.

A lot of cost estimates have been thrown around (here and elsewhere). The highest that I've seen is $4000 per unit. That is simply absurd. The initial run of prototypes was far less per unit, and this was a small batch made to iron out the kinks. Economies of scale and design tweaks will drive this down even further.

The chassis design is actually quite elegant from a manufacturing standpoint. That's something that I hope will be made evident by follow-up posts that delve into more technical detail.