With the GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 690 launches, the basic conclusion was, nice card if you can get one.  Which you can't.  Will the GTX 670 be any different?

It might.  Surely Nvidia is going to have volume production of GK104 dies eventually.  They might have waited to launch the GTX 670 until they had cards to sell.  Of course, they could have done that with the GTX 680, too, and demonstrably didn't.  And don't give me the "it's high demand" excuse; the market for $500 video cards isn't very big, especially when a lot of the people who wanted the new generation's high end and had been waiting for it had already gone out and bought a Radeon HD 7970.

This is different from the Radeon HD 7970 paper launch.  There, AMD said that cards would be available on January 9--and they were.  And they've been in stock ever since then.

How does performance go?  Well, it's hard to cite an average, since the Radeon HD 7970 sometimes beats a GeForce GTX 680 and sometimes loses to a GTX 670.  Saying that card A on average performs between cards B and C is a little dubious if it usually either beats both or loses to both.

Still, I think it's sufficient to say that at $400, you'd rather have a GeForce GTX 670 than a Radeon HD 7950, unless you need some AMD-specific features.  Or perhaps you need some GPU compute stuff, which Tahiti is built for and GK104 still isn't.  If you're looking at a Radeon HD 7970 or a GeForce GTX 680 instead, then you've got a bigger budget.  But that assumes that all of the cards are available at MSRP; the Radeon cards are and the GTX 680 hasn't been.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out further down the chain.  It's one thing to buy a Radeon HD 7870 for $350 when the big step up in performance would have been $500; it's quite another when $400 will get you something a lot nicer.  Will there be price cuts on Pitcairn?  Consider that there's also a gaping hole in AMD's lineup between the $140 Radeon HD 7770 and the $250 Radeon HD 7850.  It's not hard to imagine AMD moving the 7850 and 7870 to $200 and $300, respectively.  That would also fix the problem of performance per dollar going way down if you buy anything above a Radeon HD 7770, or perhaps a 6870.

As for cutting prices on Tahiti, I'd expect AMD to want to keep Tahiti priced well above Pitcairn.  Offer a 7870 and a 7950 for the same price and people will grab the 7950.  That's a problem for AMD, as the 7950 is a lot more expensive to build than a 7870.  Surely AMD wants to sell some 7950s; it's just that I think they'll be content to price cards such that they sell a lot more 7870s.

Unlike Tahiti, Pitcairn and Cape Verde are gaming GPUs through and through, and don't really care that much about GPU compute or professional graphics.  They'll likely be more competitive against GK107 and GK106 cards than Tahiti has been against GK104.  Of course, right now, they're completely dominant, as Nvidia hasn't bothered to show up.  And even Nvidia's last generation stuff makes no real effort at competing with Cape Verde.

Making it simple...

i use a radeon 7970 and im very well satisfied with it... i can run anything i want to play for now...

I use a 7870 and can play anything I want without problems.

For what it's worth, New Egg currently has 5 of 7 SKUs in stock, while Tiger Direct currently has 3 of 9.  To me, a "hard launch" means, from launch day onward (until people don't particularly care anymore), there's always at least one SKU in stock.  Having some stay in stock while others go out of stock is perfectly normal.  If they all go out of stock, that's a soft launch.

Nvidia probably saved up a bunch of dies over the course of the past month and a half since launching the GTX 680.  If a die can't meet GTX 680 specs, you save it and use it later for a lower bin if you can.  Those should all show up at once now, so the GTX 670 has a chance of being a hard launch.  But that many SKUs selling out already on launch day is not a good sign.

Now New Egg has 2 GTX 670s in stock, and Tiger Direct only has one.  They're Galaxy and Zotac, so it's not likely that they got a ton of those cards, either.  Nvidia might give preferential stocks to EVGA, but not Galaxy or Zotac.