Actually, in automotive terms horsepower doesn't mean squat if it isn't tied into proper torque at the right place in the car's power band. That's why a lot of European cars tend ride better than Japanese cars during day to day driving - they tend to max out their torque at lower RPMs, giving you good acceleration at the stop lights and on ramps without having to rev up the engine in neutral. If you've ever compared a Honda to a VW by test-driving them, you find that even though the Honda will go faster in the end the VW just feels nicer to drive around town in stop and go traffic (the kind of traffic you spend most of your time in anyway).
The Athlon/Pentium thing is the same way. You have to choose what it is going to be used for. For general business, the Athlon does better. If you play Unreal Tournament, the game almost always plays better on AMD chips because the code is more optimized for 3D Now! than SSE or MMX. The P4 is best when it comes to DCC work and Quake-derived games (and presumably Doom III). In the end, what it came down to for me was cost. With an AMD/NF2 based system, I could put together a really nice system for not a lot of money. This is important for me because when you get down to it, a PC system is really pretty disposable. It is spiffy for about a year, tolerable for another year, and by the third year you are ready to give it to your grandmother for her to surf the net on and write letters on. I just don't see the point in spending more than $1000 for a machine that will be obsolete so quickly. The Athlon/NF2 combo lets me maximize the dollars I spend while giving me room to grow for the short term as prices drop on upgrade parts (I expect a 3200+ to be down to below $100 in practically no time once the Athlon 64 becomes common).
