Wonder how many times you'd need to teleport around to get back to that cost. :p
And well, Scrooge McDuck purchased whole shop just to get free TV.
Those are outdoor only furniture and apartments have no outdoor space. Looking at the preview from the liveletter (here at about the 2 minute mark), there's a crystal on the opposite side of the chocobo stables that you'll probably be attuned to when you purchase an apartment. Judging from the video (and that the whole system seems to be a tweaked FC house) you'll likely teleport to the front of the building, have to then enter the building to proceed to the apartment access door and then select to go to your apartment or an open apartment from a list of all apartments in the building.
I own 3 houses and still plan on getting an apartment. Come at me.
Translation of the apartment part of the latest 4Gamer/Dengeki interview: "90 people can live in an aparment per ward. They can actually have 500 people live in one apartment, but in that case there will be wards with nobody living in them, so they started with 90 so people spread out among all the wards. If that's not enough, they'll add rooms instantly."
If that is true, people are freaking out for nothing; we're looking at potentially 36k apartments per server, which will be more than enough even for Balmung and Gilgamesh. And even if it isn't, new apartments will be considerably easier to add than new housing plots anyway.