If I understand correctly, they have to enter the digits one by one from left to right. This is bad interaction design for the following reasons:
- It violates the principle of least surprise. Users see a text boxe, they expect it to behave like a textbox. The conventions may not be ideal, but you have to take them into account.
- There's a lot of work between what users have in their head and what they have to do before they see that on the screen. They have to scan the digits from left to right in their head and add them one by one.
- The state of the system doesn't correspond to what the users wants. In three of your wireframes (ie. three states in the flow) the price is completely different from what the user wants to achieve. The first has 5 cents, then 50 cents, then 5 dollars. If the five went into the dollar column immediately, that would be close to the target. If the user has to make 50 first, then 50.20 and then 50.25, that's a logical plan: it focuses on the big stuff first and then lets you finetune the details. Going from five cents, to 5 bucks and two cents to 50.25 is a roundabout way of getting to the target.
The problem is the fixed decimal point. It means that however you start everything in between is a valid (and often strange) value. If people fill in the decimal point themselves, they can type the vakue that they have in their head however they like.
My preferred solution in these cases is to have a smart interpreter that can handle most inputs, and to give immediate feedback on how you're interpreting the value:

download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
The feedback should appear when the text box loses focus, and disappear when the user changes the value in the textbox. It uses green text for values that are understood, red for values that can't be parsed and orange for values that are technically legal but far from the expected value.
This also allows you to start simple: just force people to use a certain format and interpret it rigidly (and show them instructions), and enrich the interpreter if the field turns out to be important in the user's flow. You could even let it do currency conversion automatically.