Yah $959 is expansive, but remember this is a server board with dual NIC and SCSI on board, 2 64bit pci slot If you look at dual GX boards with these kind of spec, they are at least $475. Tyan thunder 2500 with Serverwork chipset is like $699. Plus everything in Japan is more expansive, so I would say the price of this board is not exactly outrageous. I would say once it hit the street here, the price shoulb be close to $800.
Mobo maker like Gigabyte and the others are waiting for Polamino to come out before they will introduce their own 760mp board, so that should be like Jun/July time frame. They will most likely have plain vanilla boards which should be at $200~$300 range. I remember seeing somewhere that AMD dual boards requires more layers of PCB(spelling??) and will be more expansive than dual intel boards.
But hey, dual 1.5 Polamino is gonna kick dual 1g p3 any day, so I would definately wait and pay for it, if they are indeed stable. (They shouldb be since IBM is gonna have their server line based on 760MP chipset)
And for those who think it's better to build P4, remember we are talking about SMP here, not only P4 cannot beat current 1.2g SINGLE Athlon in most benchmarkS, it will not be able to do SMP. So don't even mention P4 in the same sentance with dual Athlon setup!!