You're inadvertently helping me make my point. You've framed $1000 as a high(er)-end laptop. The cheapest Retina MacBook Pro is $1,700; $1,000 is the cheapest laptop Apple sells. That the entry-level price point to the Apple system is at the high(er) end of mainstream PC laptops was essentially my whole point.
Higher price points let them include higher specs, even on non-obvious pivots like pixel density and overall build quality.
It wasn't inadvertent, it was intentional. I'm agreeing with you that there exists a market that sees $1000 as too much to pay for a laptop, and the $250 market exists. I then went on to disagree with that market based on personal experience. I've also seen some markets who will look at a $1000 Thinkpad and say "if I'm spending that much, I might as well buy a $2000 Macbook".
$1000 is the high end of the Windows laptop line, and gets you just as much as the $2500 Macbook. But you're right, when you hit that price for Windows laptops, people sometimes begin to balk and move to Mac, for one reason or another.
This laptop is something like 3 years old at this point, and I bought it new for around $1200, I think. And it does 1920x1200. So it's not really that only Apple can afford to put this kind of thing on a laptop - I don't buy that.
We don't know what percentage of sales models like yours were of the manufacturer's sales. Was that percentage increasing or decreasing? Was it profitable? There are a lot of factors at play here. If it wasn't selling, they're going to do less of that and more like the sub-$500 ones that are. Perhaps they concluded that the market for $1200 laptops is not worth pursuing.
Also worth noting is that 1920x1200 is less dense than the Retina displays.
Higher price points let them include higher specs, even on non-obvious pivots like pixel density and overall build quality.