You'll see this same behavior anywhere demand greatly exceeds supply. I know I'll never see a Raspberry Pi in real life because they refuse to meet demand for whatever reason, so it doesn't really bother me.
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.