I think nvidia priced the cards to keep miners away for a while. They didn't want miners scooping them up in bulk before gamers had a chance to get their hands on them. If nothing else, it should keep the value of the 1000 series a little higher on the secondary market before nvidia starts dropping prices before Christmas.
I am pretty sure they main purpose of pricing it so high is not to keep it away from miners. If they price it way too high then pretty much no gamers will buy and gamers will just buy some 2nd hand (retired mining GPUs) from eBay and SLI them together and will get a much better speed than with the flagship model. Basically 2 of the 1080ti will probably outperform the single 2080ti and will probably cost less if bought used.
Right now mining is not profitable and even if the GPUs were very cheap, miners wouldn't buy them. Everybody right now is jumping ship.