"Objective product quality" in one specific metric though. (Which is "FPS/$ in popular GPU-limited high-end games") That's fine, and not a bad metric really, but it's not the only metric that matters to everyone.
Personally, for me things like consistent performance across "badly optimized" games and VR performance matter, and in those the comparison looks different. And that's before going into specific feature sets (like support for forcing SGSSAA).
Also, especially in the enthusiast space, when you only match performance at a slightly lower price much later on there is understandably not much excitement about that. Most enthusiasts who want that performance level and are prepared to spend in its price category probably already did so. That's different of course in the value segments, at least in theory, but Steam survey numbers seem to indicate that the "halo product effect" (which is, and I agree with that, not really rational of course) is clearly a thing.
