I was dubious about Agilent's claim that they were "game changing" scopes. After thinking about it though, I think they are right, but possibly not for the reasons they thought. Perhaps it is an effect of the weak Pound Sterling versus the Dollar / Yen, or perhaps I have just had my nose in the 2nd hand market for too long, but for what it does, it does seem still pretty expensive. Sure, there are some stunning features. Features that people doing specific jobs may use once a year, but when you look at the core 100MHz dual trace scope, and look at what you actually use a scope for, then I can't see people queued up outside their local representative's door.
But I said it was a game changer? Absolutely. Here is a short story: In the book "The Zen of Graphics", Mike Abrash tells of how he worked with a guy who developed PC video card hardware. This was still comparatively early days, with no 3D and only a small amount of hardware acceleration. This guy had gone as far as he thought he could with the transistor count available to him on the custom silicon, but one day he heard that their competitor had added a command buffer. Now, our hero thought about what this meant, and he knew it had the possibility to free the CPU up from a wait loop, and had the potential to be a product killer, making his product look slow and outdated even before it had shipped. He knew he couldn't compete with that, he had only a couple of dozen gates spare at most, but he put in a very crude double register, which would help, but he was afraid that his competitor's hardware was going to absolutely murder them. As it turned out, the competitor's product was nothing of the sort, and our hero's product was vastly superior. All because he believed that someone else had done a better job with the same resources that he had.
I think people like Rigol are going to look at this scope and think "crikey, this isn't that far in front of where we actually are now". Big LCDs are cheap, as are FPGAs, and fast and wide ADCs are getting cheaper by the day. Add some free Linux, and they could have 90% of the scope for 25% of the price. If I were an engineer in one of these companies now, I'd be rubbing my hands at the way the market had just moved.