If they didn't want them in the first place they shouldn't buy them!
Now you could argue that the R/Pi folks could have gotten better funding for their causes by taking that money, and they did some of that with the initial 'alpha run' auction they did, but when the wave passes it will be irrelevant.
Now I personally would have sold them for a bit more (we've had lots of conversations on HN about it) and used the extra to fund a small tech support team to keep the problem reports manageable and turn around community discoveries and work arounds for problems into active out reach, but that is just me.
There are lots of factories in China which could make 250,000 of these a day and not blink if they had the parts so I'm not concerned that supply will always be this tight.
Some customers are willing to pay the higher price. If nobody will buy at that high of a markup, you can be sure the prices will come down.
So for whatever reason, those who feel it's worth the extra money can get theirs first.
Since this is such an inexpensive device, it's certain to become widespread. This price bump will be short lived.
How are they refusing to meet demand?
Yes they made some mistakes, not realising that they wouldn't be able to handle distribution and handing it off to Farnell/RS at the last minute = well you live and learn
Perhaps a silicon valley attitude company would have made a bigger splash, pre-sold the first 10,000 for $100 or done a kickstarter appeal to raise $1M and had an initial run of 100K units. Perhaps someone with west coast connections would have been able to get a few $M from someone at Google/Ebay/Facebook.
In my experience trying to get $M from charity foundations for something like this would take years and cost more in marketing than it cost to actually do it - ask the OLPC guys.
Funnily enough, their aim was to copy the success of the original BBC micro (= the UK equivalent to the Apple II). Back in the 80s when we actually made things - industry could get government loans to tool up to build products, now we just hand out trillions to banks.