You could price out a desktop for your own comparison. I don't think it's fair to compare something explicitly designed to be a workstation to a desktop-class machine.
It's both fair and not; if you want a desktop, the cheapest POWER desktop is 3k, and at 4 cores it's arguably not competing against TR. Yes it's IO throughput will put a desktop class part to shame, but you can't go any cheaper.
Agreed. There isn't really a viable desktop-class offering from Raptor. This is a shame.
For those who have need for the workstation-ish features Raptor offers in its Talos line, the premium isn't too great over a roughly equivalent x86 workstation-class machine.