Apple is loosing karma by the minute with a lot of experts, for the reasons we all know - but the legend that their hardware is overpriced is simply that: A legend. Within the spec-range they choose to deliver and cater to, they are, in fact, quite a good value. Denying that is just being silly.
Allow me to speak as one of the "silly" people.
3 years ago my company got me a 13" Macbook for $1300 and my wife got a 14" Compaq with similar hardware (both C2D 2.1GHz) for $600. The Macbook was heavier than the larger-screen Compaq, more than twice the price and overall it was a much worse experience than my previous laptops so I returned it in just a couple of months.
A bit over a year ago, my company got me a MacPro for 4500Euro (I was now in Europe). It would be over 5500 Euro if I had not bought and installed the 12GB RAM myself. A few months before that I had assembled a 1000Euro PC for myself. It turns out the PC was not only faster but also had USB 3 and eSATA, neither of which were on the MacPro because even though they are definitely useful to connect disk arrays on a professional workstation like the MacPro, Apple just had to wait for something they approve. And, besides, you would always spend more money to get an expensive third party esata card, right? Also the PC was more silent, yeah, if you get the proper hardware (Antec in my case) you can build better than Apple and much cheaper. Then, let's go to the "superdrive". It was so loud (vibrations) and slow that I replaced it with a drive I had around. Why put such a miserable drive on a high end machine? Oh, and the first time I had to do a video-conference I found out that unlike $100 machines, the only microphone jack was at the back of the huge machine and mine actually did not even work! Another yay for the 4500 euro Apple marvel.
So don't tell me Apple=expensive is a myth. If my company was not paying I would never spend all that money for a Mac. And the iphone is also way too expensive. It has gotten better of course. Remember that for the first iphone you had to pay an arm and a leg to Apple/AT&T when the hardware specs of the device were a generation behind the Dell PDAs of several years back (If you had an Axim X50/51v back in 2004/2005 you'll know what I am talking about) which were sold under $300 back in THEIR day. At least the 4S has good hardware.
The only real exception I see is the iPad. For the first time, with the New iPad (what a brilliant name...) I see Apple going after hardware dominance at a very competitive price, and they made the iPad 2, which was already not really overpriced and with decent hardware, even cheaper. I don't know, perhaps this trend will pass on to Macs as well so in the future perhaps they have top-specs and a competitive price tag? Or is it just an attempt to get all the tablet market share right now?