I saw the video, but I mostly interpreted that part as a promotional speech about how exceptional Nokia manufacturing is with this design. Apple does similar things when talking about its products.

I'm just saying that I don't believe it really is that much more expensive compared to more traditional phone manufacturing lines.
This is only based on my believe that Nokia has a lot of smart people working for it, and I don't believe they would think that a "unibody" plastic case and curved screen would be so important that people would be willing to pay a lot more for those features.

Also it appears that upcoming Symbian and Windows Phone devices use a similar design. So even if the manufacturing process is expensive because it currently is new, they can smear out the R&D costs over a much larger range of products and sales.
Nokia always was extremely good at making cheap robust mass-market phones. I think this new manufacturing process is designed for that reason.

Nokia probably put a lot of R&D in this production process because of two reasons: fewer part probably means more easily automated manufacturing (labor in Europe is expensive), and fewer products will be returned under warranty, because a reduction in parts should increase robustness and reliability.
This last thing is also a very good thing for consumers, the N9 should be very robust from a physical point of view.