a) Who came to their house and twisted their arm to pay a ridiculous price to be the 1st one on the block to have the new thing ?
b) How many issue free new generation releases have their been in recent years ? AMD has stability issues, black screen issues, inadequate power connectivity on the 480 ... some vendors have had a harder time than others ... EVGAs 9xx fail where heart sink missed GPU ... their 10xx fail where the left out the thermal pads ... their use of non overclokcing (non A) series GPUs in 2xxx.
This has less to do with price gouging and everything to do with turning a blind eye to reality. Their expectation should be that if they want to escape buyer's remorse, wait for prices to stabilize and wait for early release problems to be corrected.