Are there really only a 100,000 Cores out there?
Personally, I get the reasoning behind the core, funny thing is that decision was made back when Xbox had trouble competing with PS2 price-wise because of the built-in hard drive. MS kept the price about even with PS2, but lost a lot of money because of it.
If Microsoft had known PS3 was going to be $500-$600, it probably wouldn't have bothered with Core in the first place.