Four years is a long time by the standards of industry giants like Yamaha, Panasonic, Pioneer, or Denon since they typically operate on a "model year" structure, but for smaller companies like Outlaw, Rotel, Sherwood, etc., it is not particularly unusual. In many cases, large manufacturers take an existing design and tweak it a bit to create a new model for a new model year, with major changes occuring only every three or four years. Smaller companies more often keep an existing design on the market for several years, saving them production retooling costs (it also makes their buyers feel less "behind the times" when their model is replaced after ten months by a model with one new feature). The development time and money involved in this stuff is significant, all the moreso for smaller designers.

The price tag, which I suspect will land just shy of $1000 (although I suppose they might surprise us and come in around $900), is about 40% more than the Model 1050's original price of $599 - the 1050 price was dropped to $499 after it had been on the market for about a year, similar the price drop on the 950 after a year. Considering some of the differences in the two products, I think that price difference is not surprising - the 1070 will sport component switching with video upconversion (the 1050 had no component switching at all), 65W of power for seven channels with all seven driven at once (the 1050 had 65Wx6, with up to three driven to 65W at once), and DVI switching, to name a few differences.