I think SpeedTree will still be superior, but knowing E-on that probably means nothing, so don't expect the price of the PlantFactory to be below SpeedTree's price.
They probably have the guts to ask >$1000 because they have large fanboy base who will buy this anyway along with obligatory ridiculously expensive maintenance paths.
So despite what it can do and how stable it will be, they will sell many copies of it.
With speedtree you can have all of your tree to be geometry and that remains to be seen for the Plant Factory, since Vue can't cope with too much geometry very well.
It might be well possible that it will be a lot of opacity mapped stuff.
Slightly off topic: I've seen a little video of Plant Factory and I was yet again surprised to see how much nomenclature and tools were ripped from XFrog and SpeedTree. These guys at E-on are pretty shameless
Ha, reading this back may seem like a kind of rant, but isn't meant to be
It's just my expectations: an unstable, expensive and possibly competitive product for SpeedTree.
We'll see!