Unlike the SBCs that use BCM2711 or other larger chips, the Pico and Pico W are built on the RP2040, which has been in abundant supply for many months.
Right now there is stock on a number of reseller sites, and though they might sell through for the first few weeks as enthusiasts bundle up a bunch of orders, I would bet it will be easy to get them at MSRP (maybe with expensive shipping of course) in the next few months at the latest.
The Pico was sold out for a month or two initially, but there's a ton of stock right now—heck, you can buy the RP2040 by the thousands on reels from any distributor.
You can get RP2040 based boards now for a handful of dollars. I've been working with a RP2040-zero (third party board) on an epaper side-project for the last few weeks.
They're a lot more plentiful than the mainstream Pi boards.
I spent about $85 (AUD) on mine, it's a 5.83-inch tri-color (black/white/red), 648x480 display. For that much it came with the interface board so I could wire the display to my microcontroller easily enough.
I think that's reasonable cost-wise for my purposes (I'm making a status display to go inside my white-build gaming 'rig' to look shiny). Red takes about 12 seconds to refresh, AFAICT I should be able to get sub-1s black updates. You can get 7-color versions for about the same price but the refresh on those is very slow.
As ever it depends what you want to do - If you want a 2-inch tri-color display, in a format where you can attach SPI wires easily, you might get away with $20 AUD. You can find small greyscale eink displays very cheap (sub-$1) like this - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003555154992.html
But you'll need to find some sort of interface from the ribbon cable to whatever wires you need.
If you want full-color, fast-update e-ink/epaper, that's just filtering into the market AFAICT, and it's much more pricey. I can find a 31.5 inch full-color epaper display for about $2200(US)!
Right now there is stock on a number of reseller sites, and though they might sell through for the first few weeks as enthusiasts bundle up a bunch of orders, I would bet it will be easy to get them at MSRP (maybe with expensive shipping of course) in the next few months at the latest.
The Pico was sold out for a month or two initially, but there's a ton of stock right now—heck, you can buy the RP2040 by the thousands on reels from any distributor.