To put this in perspective, I just dropped
$40K on a first gen product!

People drop big money on first gen products, all the time...
My first gen product happened to be a car. Completely new, unproven model. Like the watch, it will be outdated, next year, as the company adds features and fixes some of the issues and shortcomings in my "first gen" model.
The thing is, like my car, the Apple Watch will still be useful a year from now...several years from now, even. Heck...my iMac, from 2006, is way out of date. However, it is still very useful and able to do everything that it was able to in 2006....