No not at all, the company is not a charity they are in the business to make a profit. Selling these memory cards will help counteract the loss they make on the vita all the while protecting the companies assets. I am not sure if Sony is selling the device at a loss anymore either so we may see a price cut on the memory  cards in the coming months. 

199 is the best price for a hand held

@Analyst:

The consumer in me understands your/and everyone elses disgust with the price. They are put above market value of the same memory sticks they would be replacing. Its aggrevating because they are in no way better for the consumer. They cost more, AND are slower than the Pro Duo's.

Yet...when putting yourself in Sony's shoes you can at least understand why they are how they are. Piracy was a HUGE proble on the PSP. Bigger than 360s, bigger than Wii's, bigger than DS's. More people were pirating PSP games than were actually buying them(even if the games were actually still selling decent amounts). It was also ridiculously easy to do, where you would be harder pressed to find a person who owned a PSP and it WASN'T modded (at least in the US). The mem cards are now locked in on a proprietary format just like memory cards on older systems. This decreases odds of piracy by 20 fold.

Yet they are also a system accessory, which are still going to always be marked up to make maximum profits. I recall paying $70 for an 8GB Pro Duo too back in the day for the PSP. Those were NOT always cheap and actually were priced higher for less back then. When you buy an extra controler, battery pack, memory card for a console they have always been priced at aout 12 times actual value in order to make a return profit. They are totally optional and rarely required, meaning they have to make up for the cost of mass production somehow. Every one memory card sold pays for the production of 20 (or something crazy like that).

I don't know why people took arms against this so suddenly when the PSP's debut had the same situation. They acted as if we didn't know it would need a memory stick on the side. Sony did us a solid by making it only required for some games, as most of them can be saved on the cart. Even then you would only ever need a 4gb for saves, which can be found for $20 or less(being heavily bundled as well right now for FREE). The prices will come down eventually just like the ProDuo.

Using a proprietary memory format only provides something in case of piracy: They are going to buy your memory cards, instead of memory cards made by other manufacturer. The memory format has nothing to do with the level of difficulty of a hack.

Why haven't they made a Vita memory card microSD adapter yet?

Why are people paid to do this?!