When Apple debuted its Thunderbolt cable, I imagine a lot of people said the same thing I did: "Fifty bucks? For a cable?!" However, iFixit did a teardown on Apple's Thunderbolt cable and found that it's not just a length of copper wire with connectors at either end. It turns out the Thunderbolt cable comes with some embedded chips designed to manage the high data transfer rate made possible by the Light Peak tech underlying Thunderbolt, and those chips are probably the main factor behind the cable's relatively high cost.
