Nonsense. There have always been more companies producing BD players than ever produced HD-DVD players, so there's plenty of competition to lower hardware costs. Remember the price trajectory of DVD players?
The only thing competition between the two formats might have done was engender competition at the patent/software licensing level, but those royalties are low enough that they were never going to be determinative between the two formats, nor anything that a customer would ever notice.
Perhaps you'll see BD movies be $1 a disc higher than they might otherwise have been or some such, but that'd be about the extent of it, and given that all of those prices will drop as volumes increase, the rising tide should lift the boats just fine.