Im no fan of any AMD/Intel camp, but the P4E isnt that bad. Tom forgets that this cpu, like most P4C's, work better at high clockspeeds.
Technically speaking, the P4E could have been a failiure with such a huge x86 pipeline. Not too sure what Intel did, it cant be just branch predictor improvements + 1mbyte of cache that causes such improvements, but its highly impressive...