They wouldn't ditch all devices under $1,499, they would offer Air models between the low end and $1,499 to fill the gap. Above you quoted something from Tim Cook, but it had nothing to do with the regular, non-retina MBP line, so I'm not sure what the relevance was to the discussion, but in the scheme of things, the REAL issue for the non-retina machine is the fact that Apple is moving 100% away from HDD's, so a non-retina MBP with SSD would obviously increase the price, since the pricing of the SSD is more than the HDD's they were normally equipped with (and with less internal storage)...so let's say a 320GB SSD equipped MBP without retina display was put in their pricing gradient in between the Air and the retina model...$1,199 is where the bottom end model was new before, so I'd honestly say $1,299 would not be surprising...$200 more for the retina model is not a large enough gap and anyone would admit that.
I mean there's no set in stone info on this, but i just don't see the non-retina model MBP being around much longer...especially with the direction of their internal builds on the computers. Nobody is going to buy a non-retina model for such a small pricing difference, especially when the retina machine is more efficient in many ways.