The Radeon 9700 Pro featured an ultra-high 325 MHz core and 620 MHz memory speeds, so it would only be natural for the Radeon 9700 to tone these down somewhat, in order to hit a lower price point. That's exactly what ATI has done, and the Radeon 9700 sports lower core and memory speeds, while not losing any of the core features that made the Pro version such a hit.
The Radeon 9700 runs at 275 core and 540 MHz memory, which is a noticeable drop from the Radeon 9700 Pro. The key is that lower clock speeds is really all you're losing, as the Radeon 9700 still includes 8 pixel pipelines, and a 256-bit interface to the 128-MB of DDR memory.