He's probably talking about professional line of graphics cards (e.g. Tesla), where $1k is considered quite cheap. Titan is the first consumer oriented card by

He's probably talking about professional line of graphics cards (e.g. Tesla), where $1k is considered quite cheap. Titan is the first consumer oriented card by nVidia that can be used as a pro-grade card (no throttling on compute tasks) so maybe that's what the OP was talking about. Of course for gaming the Titan is not considered cheap at all.