ahock, Its not like Intel products have never had memory compatibility problems (people just seem to forget Intel ever had a problem once it has been fixed).
When the 865 and 875 Intel chipsets where new they had plenty of compatibility problems (
Finicky at DDR400) in fact Anandtech did an article called
865PE & 875P Memory Guide just because of these problems. Once these new chipsets had been out for awhile and recieved BIOS updates most of those teething pains disappeared (I think the same can be said for most of the AMD problems also).
I also don't see how the integrated memory controller affects a motherboards life, install a new processor and you get an updated memory controller. In theory it should extend the motherboards life, in reality I don't think it makes much of a difference.
One other thing, Intel supports more than 2 sockets, if you are going to include AMDs server line (socket 940 for Opteron) then you need to (at least) include Intels current server line (socket 604 for Xeon). There are also speciality boards (I believe there called socket 479) for the Pentium M chips, and socket 370 boards are still available for Intel, its only as confusing as you want to make it.