It's unfortunate that these new generation cards are only going to be offered for PCIe. I can imagine that the throughput of the newer slot is relative to the speed of AGP, and that texture bandwidth wasn't completely utilized previously.
All of us with AGP ports are left to wallow in previous generation cards - which is fine, except for the fact that the prices probably aren't going to change drastically, since it will be the last of that line of cards.
Isn't it possible that the video card companies are loosing profit for ignoring the AGP market? Not everybody in the world wants to upgrade to new motherboards, processors, etc - just to implement a brand new video card. I could see that either ATI or Nvidia would make a killing if they offered the new chipset to the older market. At least until the conversion to PCIe was complete.