You aren't comparing apples to apples. It's pretty clear that Jolla was never intended to launch as a lower-cost competitor to Nexus 5. That makes it a bit silly to criticize it for not being one, particularly at launch. How long has the Android platform had to bring costs down? A long time.

It's unfair to compare a phone hardware company that needs to make money to survive to a company that gets almost all its money from ads, searches, cloud and personal data and uses that money to subsidize hardware as a loss leader(or making bare profits) both to gain marketshare and also to undercut and weaken other smartphone companies' profit margins so that they have less money to compete in web search now or in the future. [1]

From a consumer point of view, you're right though. The market is heading towards commoditization and Jolla will most likely fall into the moat if people compare them on price alone.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/