tcsenter: you are right and you are wrong I would say..
I remember when my older brother bought our 486-66, 32mb ram, 2mb video card, with a TURBO switch, and a MASSIVE 300 meg hd (or was it the massive 2 gig hd, I don't recall)
And for a few years, it was a great rig.. and then we needed to buy a P133 to be able to play quake II (quake I was great.. hah still is sort of..)
I don't expect anything less of this rig, except that even in a few years, quad core still will be above standard, and even if my benchmark scores suck, well my dual video (or single video not sure yet) will still be able to perform decently for more than 5 years I believe.
For example, a 7800 GTX is still a good graphics card although it is almost considered old (but quite good regardless)
Maybe after a few years, my 8800 setup will be obsolete, or ATI will come out with something 100 times better, but the point being:
1) am I happy with what I got?
2) Does it satisfy my needs?
3) Will it last a while? (eg, my athlon XP system is like an old car that no matter how many upgrades/fixes I can't get the performance of the latest rigs..)
In a year, 2 years, 3 years, if my system is complete crap and I can't play anything, then I'll just do what I always do. Upgrade a bit by bit, until it's stable and up to my expectations.
Thing is though, I really don't expect this to happen for longer than that, because I expect the shelf-life of the latest systems to be quite a bit longer... as it's not like the difference between a 2ghz P4 and 2Ghz Athlon 64 right now, but moreso the difference between a Dual-Core AMD and Dual/Quad-core Intel.
The competition, I'm sure will bring a lot of new tech on our plate, but I'm not the type of guy that upgrades every 15 minutes (unless of course, I just bought some stuff and something twice as good came out.. then I would be mad), but its kind of like this..
You spin the wheel and it has to stop at some point.
I say things like this to myself:
"I'll buy it when the ATI R600 comes out"
"I'll buy it when AMD's quad core comes out and see how their 8-core systems will compete"
etc..
But in the end you just gotta stop and buy something.
This rig will be the first time I have actually been able to game anything higher than 1024x768 or 1280x1024, on a monitor that supports resolutions I've never played games in, etc.. I look forward to it.