We're discussing about Nvidia's rebadging stratergy, not graphics cards which a dwindling number of people can afford.
Deceptive or not, dishonest or not, in the end the consumer gets the same amount of performance for the same price. A lot of you need to realise that this may be the only way that Nvidia stays in competition. I'd call it really, a white lie to be honest.
that the renaming doesn't necessarily confuse the consumer as generally the previous generation of cards is phased out anyway, meaning that by the time the GTS240 comes out, the 9800GT won't be sold anymore. Therefore, they'd only have the GTX295, GTX285, GTX280, GTX260, GTX240 and GTX220 from Nvidia's range of cards. Very confusing? I think not!
And to the majority of TPU, rebadging in a graphics card market's frequency when compared to the Guitar industry makes Nvidia look very innocent (as well as AMD).
AND Finally, innovative, whatever or not, a 8800GT = 9800GT and GTX240 in performance, AND price if they were still avaliable. Does the consumer get ripped off? No. Its an excellent value card that can play almost every recent title at max settings for a majority of games (ignoring the synthetic benchmarks which are never reliable indicators of performance).
Unfortunately... I have to admit the 48xx series isn't as desirable as it was on release now thanks to the latest driver sets for the G92 cards... most of my games from the 169.21 driver onwards have almost had their framerates doubled O_o.