NOS you are mistaken... Asus was heavily critized for NOT releasing a K7 board at first and was accused of taking money from Intel for not doing so... the K7M wasn't even officially out till 2-3 months after the inital release of the K7. The three first K7 motherboards was as I stated before MSI 6167, FIC SD11 and Gigabyte GA-71X.
The MSI 6167 was on pricewatch on the 9th of august 1999 (the day the NDA on the Athlon was liftet)
Specification of the K7M was first seen on august the 21th, and the board was officially lauched on september the 9th under the "covername" Freeway.
If you do not believe me I suggest you brush up a bit on your history, I have checked up on mine with archived news primarely from amdzone, and they were in fact correct, I just didn't remember the exact dates.
EDIT: there were basically two camps back then regarding the MSI 6167 either you loved it or you hated it. I've always found mine to be very stable so I think it's a very good board, however with that said I believe the Gigabyte GA-71X to be a better board, it was my first choice but I was unable to buy one here at the time so I went with the MSI.
EDIT2: PS. NOS, you're a damn spammer you know that? J/K
