Sales 101 is being able to take the conversation away from "price" and change it to "value". 20 years ago, my friend was selling IBM desktops and servers to educational institutes and I learned this from him. There was no way IBM could compete against the prices of those small computer stores, so he had to actively show how buying IBM would save money over the long run, etc. He was a very good salesman so it worked pretty well.
IBM used FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) to sell computers. Not unlike the sales tactics in this email. The actual positive "value" is only vaguely described.
That was a proactive move that turned out quite well for them. They saw that the consumer PC business was going to shrink significantly over the next 10 years, so they sold off while the price was still high.
I don't think anyone in their right mind is second guessing IBM's decision to get out of the PC business. In hindsight, it was a great move executed with perfect timing.
But they took this decision because they saw that the superior quality of their product(which having owned older Thinkpads I can say it's true) wasn't profitable enough when competing with lower cost "good enough" alternatives.
IBM's core strategy is one of technological differentiation through R&D; not price leadership. It's absolutely part of that strategy to exit commoditizing markets (which is why they got out of x86 servers as well) where product differentiation is difficult.
