What sony does it does because it's the best thing to do, sony executives won't just sit at the meetings rolling their fingers and think "ok let's cut the price of the console right now!" they just can't do it so easily since they would lose even more money and since ps3s still sell fine there's no immediate need to lower the price. Getting to the 2nd place propably isn't one of their top priorities if it endangers profiting from the console. Right now they are clearly trying to boost the sales with lot of games and with the slim, it might or might not be cheaper than the original ps3 but even if it isn't some people still buy it just because of it's more compact and appealing to them visually.
I predict slim to be around the same price as a normal ps3 maybe even 50$ cheaper, but when it starts to slow down in sales they could drop another 50$ to prolong the sales boom.
