I am never convinced entirely about cost price, but I would imagine it isn't a lot because the same components (sometimes more, sometimes less) are used in far cheaper phones on sale from other manufacturers.
HTC has been a key player in the construction of smartphones for two decades, so there's no way HTC would be charging twice as much as others, nor Google being willing to pay.
I bet we'll discover one day that HTC got the contract because it undercut Huawei and LG - knowing its own sales are in the toilet, and it needs to go back to making kit for others to survive.
Google pockets a lot of this money too, because the trade margins are still tight enough that carriers would sooner sell you a SIM for a phone you get from Currys or Google Store.
As I suspected, after the initial reviews and positive feedback from those at the Google launch (who got phones given to them soon after) more information is starting to come out, about how it was apparently a rush job (so was the 6P, so I can believe that) and has an issue that I am sure Google was aware of (lens issue) and couldn't fix in time, but has been working on in software since before it went public.
Thing is though, if Google dropped the price by £200 or so, it would suddenly become a great phone at an 'honest' price.
I'm going to see what Huawei launches next Thursday and in February we'll see the Galaxy S8. Unlike buying an iPhone and having at least a year before anything better comes along, the Pixel stands a chance of being beaten by a few devices; Mate 9, OnePlus 3T, S8 and countless phones from China that people can import.
Google will need to up not only spending on marketing in the long term (not just the first week) but also make sure to support all the retailers if it wants this phone to be seen by people. It's all very good having THREE dedicated areas in Currys, and a few big pods in EE stores, but when a local store can reveal having sold less than ten since launch, you realise that EVERY store needs working Pixel phones on display and staff willing to give you demos.
The Currys flagship store, which had the video of people queuing up to buy the Pixel on launch day, didn't sell of 32GB models at all. It sold out of the 128GB model the NEXT day. If that had been Apple, everything would have been snapped up within hours.
Samsung spend a stupid amount of money on field marketing, pop up stores/promotions and for weeks after the S6 and S7 were launched, they had agency staff working in many stores to demo the phone. John Lewis often have Samsung staff there so often you'd think they were JL staff!