What would be your move now that you know the price of the X1000?

[Daedalus]

and even more funny is that the slot is standard form factor that can easily be confused with another widely used standard. so what happens if a dumbnut puts a pcie card into that slot? does warranty covers that, i wonder?

I was under the impression that, while the slot is physically the same, it's aligned differently so you can't put a standard PCI-e card in the slot and have it match up with the backplane, and there's a PCI-e x1 slot in front of it. So, only a PCI-e 1x card will fit, and if you fit one of them it will work as expected, but will block use of the Xorro slot. No damage done. Similar to the ISA and Zorro slot layout on big-box Amigas... That's how it looked in the board layout pics that were floating around a while back anyway.

Edit: I see you don't take billt's word for it, so you probably wouldn't take mine either so. Far too easy to jump on the bandwagon. Anyway, here's a pic of the top of the PCB. You can more easily see there how it's laid out to avoid just that confusion, and to allow the use of PCI-e x1 in that slot.

[Daedalus]

With XMOS driving the card it isn't going to do much.

*sigh* I'll bite once more. Maybe you haven't bothered looking at the pictures yourself (I'm sure it's much more fun for you to just go on hearsay), but the PCIe x1 board won't go into the Xorro slot, and so would have nothing to do with the XMOS. The "Xorro" slot is physically the same as a PCIe x8 slot, but is mounted further in on the board, behind the PCIe x1 slot. That means the position can only be used by either a PCIe x1 card (and will be used as such) *or* whatever weird contraption someone might come up with for the Xorro slot. A PCIe card will not fit the Xorro slot without breaking bits off it. And a Xorro card won't fit any PCIe slot either for the same reason.

[Daedalus]

and I'd be willing to bet we will see a few examples of this sometime next year!

LOL, probably. There's only so much anyone can do to prevent these things. From working in a computer parts shop in the past you'd be amazed what I've seen people do with seemingly foolproof cards. I mean, people cutting voltage grooves in AGP cards and the like, and then wondering why they banjaxed their boards! Make it idiot-proof and God will provide a better idiot...

Also this doesn't change my opinion that it's a deliberately broken PCIe slot, just that I see it's broken physically as well as functionally.

That's fair enough, but it's like calling an Amiga joystick port a broken serial port... Maybe it's easier just to think of it as some bizarre custom interface which happens to use an industry standard connector.