The biggest takeaway is that this is a symbolic response from Intel to at least have something that can stand up against the 2990WX. Symbolic mainly because they are reportedly only going to make 1500 of them, with one motherboard maker only making 500 motherboards and the other the rest. It's not hard to understand why. They couldn't price it too high for the risk of sounding too stratospheric and thus not really competing against the 2990WX, but they also couldn't produce more or risk competing against themselves in the Xeon Platinum range. And then, with such clocks, power and thermal characteristics, they probably couldn't make many more even if they wanted to. They are at the very limits of what is possible with a 14nm++ huge monolithic die.

This is a mindshare product sold as part of expensive OEM systems (with accompanying expensive motherboards in the $1500 range), while AMD's 2990WX, with all its flaws (some of them due to Windows' flawed scheduler) is a much more affordable retail product being sold on its own and part of a more affordable ecosystem (Motherboard, RAM, PSU, etc).