$999 is way cheap for 23andme to be selling this, the microarrays cost $650 each before they are analyzed. As per a Techcrunch comment, I suspect they are subsidizing or selling below cost which will probably work out because of the rapidly falling costs in this area.
What materials are those arrays built out of? Do they require any special (laser trimmed) components? Special lithography? I smell an industry ripe to be commoditized by a startup.
I'm not sure what it actually takes to manufacture them -- there's definitely some lithography that goes into it but I don't know much beyond that. You might be able to convert an existing microprocessor plant into a DNA microarray plant but i don't really know.
This is the one that I believe 23andme is purchasing in bulk -- or, at least it is the highest end microarray sold by the company 23andme gets their arrays from. http://www.illumina.com/pagesnrn.ilmn?ID=70
