It looks like a competitor. Pik has a UI that's in the browser window rather than a pop-up prompt, which allows you to search for commands. Pik also shows you what commands are popular on a given site/page, which makes it easier to discover commands.
My understanding is the prices are high because there's an oligopoly. To have competition, all the major browsers would have to agree to let in more companies, and they're just not doing that.
FriendFeed has an in-house framework inspired by web.py and Appengine's webapp. It was written by Bret Taylor, who was the PM of appengine when it started, but is now working for FriendFeed.
He mentioned that he might open source it, but hasn't done so yet. I encourage people to put some pressure on him to do this =)!