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"Why not higher? Aren't there silicone spatulas with temperatures like 600 or 700°F listed on the packaging?
Many manufacturers' claims about this aspect of their materials are misleading. There's no special "secret formula" silicone that is food safe but more heat-safe than the rest of the pack. In fact, silicone cooking tools that cite resistance to temperatures like 600°F or 700°F are basing that claim on conditions that really can't occur outside a lab. Great for marketing, but not so good if you actually want consumers to know the product's true performance limits… say, in a searing hot wok or pan." [1]
[1] http://productofgir.com/geek-out
Also, even if GIR is heat resistant to 600-700F just like the other spatulas and just doesn't list the accurate number for some reason (which appears to be the case upon reading the aforementioned page), I still can't see what makes it so much better than the iSi spatula which is cheaper, or even other less expensive unibody silicone spatulas (of which there appear to be plenty, some of which seem to be very well designed while being more affordable so I'm not sure where the creators of the GIR were looking when they said there wasn't anything else out there).
As you heat up a polymer, it starts to soften. After a while it reaches a "glass transition temperature". Finally, it'll actually melt.
I don't plan on using any spatula above the temperature listed, so they are equally good for me. I would compare this spatula to the other one listed based on other factors.
So why don't they list the higher number? because it's misleading, has no application in the real world and doesn't make sense from both a scientific perspective and a real-world-use case.
It's sort of like listing the clock rate of a processor. Just because my Pentium 4 runs at 4 GHz does not make it better than my i5 running at 3 GHz. Some manufacturers will list the turbo boost value of an intel processor as the speed, where listing the normal value makes more sense. As always: do your research.
Now I'm no food polymers expert, but I would suspect that the "heat resistance" temperature is sort of an amorphous thing. Are they measuring the temperature above which food starts to interfere with the polymer? the temperature above which the material can start to break down and contaminate food? These things don't occur at a fixed temperature, the rate at which these processes happen increases with temperature (and other things) so giving a value (even a range) doesn't make sense at all to me.
So unless I see a whitepaper detailing their experimentation, results and interpretation of the results, I will have to assume that it's safe for whatever I want to use it for and evaluate it on other factors.