Actually the price of death it's not so much here compared to EvE, where you clone and implants might cost a lot more, like 10 times more than your ship.
I like the way it is here. Don't take the bot you can't afford to lose. It's simple.
The only good thing that this feature can give it's a convinience. When you get blown up you don't need to do all this routine with buying and remembering all the modules. By the way, there can be craftable items for recovering every size of bot and equip, like a charges for it somewhere in character sheet. And the NIC cost too.
Making it Alpha or NPC only can have a negative effect, because the carebears may became more terrified by PvP where "omg, you can actually lose robot for good"...
In any game, most players prefers to PvE, with PvP sometimes. The rest is mostly PvP. So i think the best thing to encourage more people to PvP it's just bring more players in game. No need to make PvP easier or force people to it...
And PvP have some other price in such games anyway: time spent on it...
I'm not against this feature, but i don't see a real reason for it. Well, maybe for a first 2 weeks, for newbs...