Ah, a UNMSLCN! Trips off the tongue nicely!

Personally, a Shift with 5 hour battery, atom, 2Gb, Vista, full WM 6.1, palm rejection and screen rotation for $800 (£400) would do me fine! I may ask them to make one. :-)

They can call it the HTC Shift UNMSLCN.

For a Shift with those specs I would happily pay the same what I have payed for the current Shift (€1169), however obviously wouldn't mind getting it cheaper. Ahh, add a native 1024x600 resolution and replace the Atom with a Core Solo ULV ... Also GPS should be enabled and WM7 instead of 6.1 would be nice ... plus replace the hard disk with a nice 64GB SSD (doesn't have to be ultrafast but certainly better than the cheap ones in netbooks)

To be more concrete, from my perspective HTC should not question their strategy completely. They should stick to the higher end of the market - just update their design and make the improvements that will justify the higher price. The market for €400 - €800 MID devices will be swamped and margins will be extremely thin. Unless they can add something that would make their MID the ultimate MID that nobody else can deliver (and what would that be, the Gigabyte M528 seems to be pretty perfect for a 5" device?)
As the Shift does not fit into a pocket anyway, HTC could achieve a higher battery capacity by making it marginally thicker (2 milimeters wouldn't hurt and 3 would also still be tolerable)

That's my 2 cents