The key here is all open. From mass storage to memory to boot you can "own" the entire system. There is no way to build that at any where close to this price with existing x86 machines. Just negotiating the NDA alone to have access to the TCM area of the chip would probably be $50K in lawyers fees.
That said, I had the same thought at you, $18K ? Really? Who are they kidding? And then I thought about my PC purchases over the last 12 years. I've spent about that much (granted I did so by upgrading and replacing systems every 2 - 3 years) But my last system is now 4 years old and frankly not really in that much need of replacing.
Personally I think IBM should fund this and order 200 work stations for one of its engineering teams. Get their feedback on it. Would be an interesting experiment for them.
As mentioned on a different comment, we are investigating adding a lower-spec machine to the lineup due to popular demand. We had not anticipated the level of demand for a pre-built workstation with a less powerful configuration.
Most likely, this new configuration would scale the RAM down and replace the high-end workstation GPU with a mid-range consumer card. More information will be posted to the campaign page when we have this option available.
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/power8-...