Unaffordable housing from affordable components

Last week in San Jose, California, the West Coast Green 2008 conference was held. As you might expect from the name, it was devoted to green technologies, one of which was green home construction based on used shipping containers. (You can see a picture of the home on exhibit here.) The home shown, built by SG Blocks, costs around $150 per square foot, not including land. Thus, a 1,000 square foot home would cost $150,000. That's not bad by California standards, but according to this article, the recycled shipping containers cost between $2,000 and $3,000 each, and between four and eight of them are needed to build a home (each container has 320 square feet of floor space.) I understand that there's a lot of additional work required to convert a container into a home, but it hardly seems affordable when modular and manufactured homes are available in other parts of the country for $75 a square foot or less.

I don't want to knock the movement toward using recycled shipping containers, but if the resulting homes end up not significantly less expensive than conventional stick-and-frame homes, what's the point?