I'll agree with you; forty bucks IS a lot of money to me as well, BUT i'll be getting a great value for my money AND a whole bunch of stuff i've wanted in one box that wotc apparently won't make. YMMV.
Now, as for whether or not it's a good investment for you, let me ask you a few questions:
1. do you already have enough minis to represent the core classes for 4E?
2. do you already have some kind of battlemat, and are you satisfied with it?
3. are you satisfied with whatever you use for tracking action points, conditions, and stuff like that?
4. do you already have enough dungeon tiles [or something like them] to represent the basic stuff, like stairs, pits, rubble, and scenery stuff like chests, barrels, and crates?
5. do you already have something to represent areas of spell effects?
The dry erase player and DM combat sheets, character sheets, and power card sheets are just icing on the cake for me.
To me, this is a GREAT product to go hand in hand with the wotc 4E starter and/or with the 4E core books.
I've been looking for something like this; a BIG BOX of fiddly bits. I got into 3.x late, like 2006, so I missed out on the 3.x battlebox. I'm not missing out on this one.
Klaus, is there any way that you guys would ever do 'stand up' counters? Like, instead of the people counters being square and mostly showing just the 'top half', they could be rectangular [two squares 'tall', one square wide, one piece] that shows 'the whole person' and could fit into a stand up base?
I understand that it would probably be impractical for large creatures, but what about the pc races and most humanoid size monsters, like orcs, goblins, and zombies? Or even just the PC's?
