The old price tag of the 1080 was 700 ish, then it got taken down to 500 when the 1080ti came out, which wasn't that long ago, so really if it's only just 3-5% above and sporting the new 1080 price, I'd say AMD fell behind just a bit, I mean a whole year to come up with a slight gain and sporting the same price just seems a bit sloppy. 

this is my guess also ,although anything close to the 1080 is better then what we have had in the past few years. So if they get anywhere close to 1080 levels at slightly lower price its good news

With the recent rumors of there potentially being a shortage of Vega GPU's at launch, it makes me wonder if AMD has something better than most anticipate. Most people are hoping/assuming for fantastic performance for cheap, since that's what happened with Ryzen. Yet AMD's recent profits didn't exactly meet expectations in some ways, mostly due to low prices to gain market share from Intel.
If AMD has a shortage of Vega, whether planned or not, they can be justified in pricing the cards similar, if not higher than Nvidia, if they can deliver on higher performance in comparison to Pascal. This same "strategy" happened with the 400 series as well, but not on purpose apparently. A shortage of 400 series cards led to increased prices at retailers.
AMD might as well take their share of the extra retailer profit from that situation if its most likely going to happen regardless with Vega. Few will complain if the performance is there, and AMD will show higher profits because of it. Win Win.

How so? Maybe not entirely... but there is still a fair amount of unreasonability going on there. The Fury X clocked at 1050 MHz on a 28 nm architecture. The jump to 14/16 nm alone increased clocks by some 30% on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. And unlike Nvidia, for some reason the bigger AMD GPUs are the ones with the highest clocks. No reason for it to be below even the RX 460,  a first generation GPU held back by the desire to make it work on a PCI-e without extra power connections.

It's using HBM2. If you are hoping for value, it ain't happening. Polaris was their value proposition.

The 3 SKU rumor might be true anyway. If we get two Vega GPU's this year which is what leaked details and benchmarks are hinting at... Then we might get that rumoured new Vega chip in 2018.

1.2Ghz wouldn't be below a Radeon RX 460.

But to answer your question... The wider the chip, the more energy it tends to consume. If the chip is extremely wide and power hungry, then that can come at the expense of clockspeeds, it's a balancing act.

Sometimes a smaller chip is having better power characteristics than expected, thus it will ship out with higher clockrates to hit a TDP target.

Thus a low-end GPU having a higher clockrate than a high-end GPU is not entirely uncommon... As you allude towards, the RX 460 was a high clocking part at 1090Mhz base, which is higher than the Radeon RX 470 at 926Mhz.

Better value then NVDA cards I meant. We can hope atleast