Source? I'm not from US but I googled around and Viasat offer 30/3 mbps with a soft speed cap after 100GB for 150usd/month [1] Hughes offers 25/3 mbps priced per data cap 50GB is 140 usd + equipment lease of 15usd /month.[2]

Neither of which is even remotely close to Starlink's offering.

1 - https://promo.viasat.com/plans/standard-30-715T5-11796UC.htm... 2 - https://www.hughesnet.com/get-started

OP said "where people couldn't get more than 10/2 or so for any price."

Your response directly refutes that, so I don't know why you are asking for a source. I didn't say either of those are competitive with a non-existent service offering from starlink. Wait until they have a real service that is oversubscribed, then we can discuss what plans they'll offer.

Hughesnet and other geostationary providers have 400+ Latency that are rather terrible.

Again, OP was talking about speeds, not latency. Nobody is going to refute geo has higher latency than Leo.

400+ms pings make the connection useless for anything resembling interactive use, which is pertinent.

If my internet provider had 100mbs symmetric but I got that kind of ping I wouldn't even consider it a functioning internet connection, let alone 100 mbs, even if in some theoretical tuned workload I could actually move data that fast (UUCP with tuned TCP window sizes? UDP with some sort of custom packet loss recovery algo?)

I'm not sure why you keep going down this rabbit hole, but OP was talking about bandwidth, not latency. Bandwidth on current generation satellites is just as high, or higher than Starlink. Satellite does not use TCP over the air. They have technologies for higher-latency links that make latency appear lower by controlling the window at the gateway side.

The real limitation of rural satellite services are the data caps. When I was looking at options that was a serious limiting factor. All the bandwidth in the world doesn't matter when you hit your data cap after 2 netflix kids' shows.

Starlink will have data caps as well. All models show that when loaded with the amount of subscribers they're targeting you will either get very low speeds (no throttling), or they will need to cap/throttle the heavy users. I'm not sure why people keep misunderstanding that the beta performance/price/rules are exactly what will be there for the real service launch. It's simply not feasible.

With latency >600ms to the first hop

To the first hop? 600ms is the round-trip latency of geo.

No, 600 is the total. The propagation delay just to and from the satellite is roughly 500ms. The rest is internet latency and queuing delay.

Indeed, so 600ms to the Ground station (and then normal latency on top of that)