I'd wait for in-game benchmarks on high end monitors before I believe that comparison from NVIDIA. Even if the specs are better games are still optimized for older gen cards.
No matter what, $499 is still a better deal than $1200 for a somewhat similar card. You really don’t need benchmarks for that.
Yes, but we've all been burned by GPU marketing in the past. Notice that they're only remarking on RTX performance. It's entirely possible that this card has a lower geekbench score or FLOPS output.
That's on ray tracing workloads, it's likely that the raster performance of the 2080ti will sit between the 3070 and the 3080.
I'm still sitting on a GTX 970 and was waiting for the RTX 30 release so I could buy a used RTX 20 at under $500. This pricing means that it's worth it for me to just jump straight to the 30 series.