First, I have to ask: in what way does apple's $29 TB-FW800 adapter support daisychaining? If you're going to say "by plugging in at the end of a chain and terminating that chain", I'm sorry, but that doesn't meet anyone's chain requirement.
Apple's price premium has been on the order of 10-20%, sometimes more, but sometimes actually competitive (some of the Minis were very attractive value). You're absolutely right that TB should be considerably more expensive than USB (even 3.0), and somewhat more expensive than Firewire. But that would mean that if a FW hub cost, say $40-$60 (while USB is in the $10-$20 range), then the market will be looking for TB devices at the low end to be, say $70-$90. Not $300. That's far above "premium" for mainstream products. That kind of price could be expected for early adopters, not mainstream buyers (I'm asserting, here, that there are mainstream buyers who pay premium prices, which is exactly what most Apple customers are). Csound1 is an early adopter, which is a significant notch above a premium buyer. This is exactly the way the market works, and there's nothing unusual about the way TB has played out so far except for the timeline. And the many premature announcements by companies like Belkin and others.
We will hope to see TB devices at the low end in the $50-$100 range. These will not have all of the interfaces of the Belkin hub or anything else in the $200-$300 range (and up). They might be something like Apple's TB-FW adapter with a second TB port to allow chaining. Or maybe a TB-DVI adapter with a second TB port. To support chaining!
As to this discussion, rapidly closing in on 8 pages, stuff (especially hardware) takes time. The fact that we haven't seen products doesn't mean vendors don't know we're out here complaining. And *you* don't know which vendors I've contacted with product suggestions and feedback (most of them in the list given at the beginning of this thread, in fact). This discussion is constructive on many levels. Except when people dismiss others as being irrelevant or inappropriate when they express their frustration with what has been, as I said, an unusually long timeline for mainstream products to arrive for a new technology. Bluetooth was pretty slow getting there, too, but it didn't promise nearly as much early on.
Expectations were set very high with TB, especially since Apple had its TB monitor/hub at day 1, leading many people, including myself, to take the plunge with a new MBA, only to find myself two years later still without a decent way to use my FW800 disk array without shelling out early-adopter amounts of money. At over two years out, we are expecting to see a lot more products in lower price brackets. They aren't there, and this will cause many people to be more cautious with future innovations.
