Additionally, you can buy similar devices from many recognized device programmer manufacturers - and I doubt you will call their $$$ devices "a cable".

If a "serial programmer" is $$$, not just $, you are being had.

I can manufacture a digital clock and use 1200 chips to make it, which, of course, would make me price it "$$$".. Would it still be a "clock", or would it then be a "timepiece". So making something that does the very same more complicated and giving it another name makes it different? I do not think so.

That some manufacturer, for reasons of either ignorance or greed, makes a "programmer" that replaces a cable that you can buy from digikey for $25 (hardly $$$) seems to be no reason to buy the "programmer" since as you say it does the same as the "cable" (AT89ISP)

Erik.