It didn’t feel to me that the hardware would be so expensive, so I set out to disprove you.
Turns out I can’t. I used the schematic of the mainboard to look for the main parts (curse them for not bothering to release a BOM), and guessed the rest. Couldn’t find the emmc, so i picked another random one of mouser and priced it at 22 € in quantities of 1000. The ram seems unbelievably expensive at around 30 € a pop in quantities of 1000. Couldn’t be bothered to search for the wifi module so i guessed it at 20 €. Guessed the LCD at 50 €. Came to a total of around 200 € for all the parts. That’s mouser public prices at low quantities. They probably bought in quantities of at least 10k if not more, so I guess you could knock off another 20 to 50 € off that price. But then again, you’d still have to pay for the batteries and the casing, which should be around that price-range, too. So I guess 200 € as the price for the hardware is a pretty good guess! The radio does come on top of that, though.
The two board design with the fancy connectors and the second cpu make it “unnecessarily” expensive. But really the root to the high price is that they are forced to relinquish socs.