I just think NVIDIA rather sooner than later should drop this silly tactics to focus mainly on highend, it's not a healthy business in the long run try to rely on releasing a big but fast card as there's many disadvantages that comes from this, mainly development time & cost, greater risk for yield issues, cooling & power limitation issues and not to mention there's far less customers in this price range than what ATI is focusing.
NVIDIA should try to offer a great from top-to-bottom product range based on a new arch, if they manage to pull a successful series then that would be disastrous to ATIs current tactics which would have to lower prices greatly and possibly still not getting any sales, it would start chewing on their market share which atm is what ATI is very interested.
The perhaps biggest problem right now is that even if their big fat chip is fast, ATI will still get sales as they have nothing that competes in the same price range. I just don't see the logic behind NVIDIA atm, hopefully HD 5xxx series will teach em'.
This is what I'd personally do for the next arch after GT300:
Development: focus on finding a better alternative to stream processors that are more efficient, I think it's about time to move on from them now. Or at least find ways to make them more efficient if there's no alternative made up. Also spend some time looking into the possibilities of multithreading and how to make multicore cpus cooperate better with GPUs.
I'd also make it clear to the engineers, sth like a strict 190W TDP and 50% performance increase over last gen as a goal. I'd put slightly more focus on the power consumption after GT300 than performance, the next wave can focus more on performance.
Schedule: Release first a lowend segment (think "GT460" or whatever) of the new arch like 3 - 4 months before the mid/highend (GT400) as teasers. Good for getting recognition and so you can start the marketing of the new features earlier and to simply test the grounds of the new arch b4 going to the bigger and more complex cards.
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