Yeah I know, I was midly joking in my original reply
The problem with e5500 cored CPUs is quantity. The smallest order if I remember correctly is 20 000 units. If A-eon goes and uses these processors in a hypothetical successor to the X1000 and they buy a few hundreds of them then the final product will be no cheaper then the X1000 as the CPU will again be very expensive(if I remember correctly, Trevor said that the PA6T is around 450-500 $).
I'm sure Freescale will sell them in lots of 100. But as you pointed out, the problem is price. They may not be any cheaper than the PA6T and the features do offer some drawbacks.
BTW - Having exchanged some messages with Trevor I'm inclined to believe the price range you mentioned.
So the future does give us some interesting options.
I've even discussed resurrecting the development of an MPC8610 based board with Bill Buck (due to his posted projects on the power2people website).
Although I'm not sure that sub 2.0Ghz 32bit PPCs make sense with the availability of cheap Apple G4s.
However, right now the P5010 and P5020 are some of the most powerful PPCs available.
And the future T5020 and T5040 will feature AltiVec instructions, 2.5 Ghz operation (or higher), more cores, and possibly some additional changes.
And then there's APM's Mamba and the other two unnamed processors listed on their roadmap after Titan.