This is classic competition at work. Along comes Stripe that forces companies that are not asleep, like Braintree, to compete on price or innovation or some other axes.
When I was doing research on this for my startup a few months ago, we found that Braintree easily beat Stripe on price. This is just icing on the cake.
Braintree's not as glamorous (I think), but if you're doing a large number of transactions, Stripe's 2.9% + 30ยข/transaction is quite high.
Your analysis is true although now Braintree's pricing is that of Stripe's - at least for startups who can't or don't want to spend cycles getting a stand alone merchant account. So it's good to make that distinction. I suspect the value with BT is that once you get real traction you can opt out of the more expensive rate into something more competitive - probably as soon as when you're doing a few thousand dollars per month.
