It's not a terrible bottleneck, unlikely to be worth upgrading unless you just have money you don't mind throwing away (you could sell your old stuff to make some of it back).
For quite a long time, AMD had the performance lead because the Netburst architecture of the P4 turned out not to work out so well as Intel had hoped. They thought that high clockspeeds would be enough to make up the per-clock performance difference, and then they hit a wall and couldn't actually get the clock speeds as high as they'd hoped. They were planning for like 10GHz P4's, and didn't even hit 4GHz.
The high clock speeds also resulted in extremely large amounts of heat; that was so bad they even designed a new form factor, BTX, that they hoped everybody would move to, because the layout helped in cooling the later models of the P4 without making so much noise or requiring so many fans.
In the meantime, AMD didn't really have to do much but keep increasing clock speeds, but they did more than that. Then they added 64-bit capability, and had the first dual-core x86 CPUs. Intel had to give in and use the same 64-bit instructions/design that AMD used, because Intel hadn't even been considering putting 64-bit in the P4, and they didn't have time to make up their own and try to force the industry to use it; AMD64 was already "standard". All this time, even with higher performing parts, AMD CPUs were cheaper.
Several OEMs began putting out AMD-based systems, and cutting back on Intel designs. Intel just wasn't producing anything compelling after awhile. Retailers could see that people liked AMD machines, so that's what they put on the shelves. Dell held off for a long time for various reasons, and still doesn't actually have AMD desktop systems, but they're one of the few big OEMs that doesn't sell systems at retail stores (they plan to start testing their own retail stores though).
The situation started to change in the last couple of years though. Intel introduced the new Pentium-M chip, for laptops, which was much more power-efficient than the P4 or mobile P4, lower heat, better performance at lower clock speed. It wasn't meant for desktop use though. Then they made the Core Solo and Core Duo laptop chips, which were a bit faster. Now Intel has introduced the Core2Duo architecture for desktop and laptops. They're derived from the Pentium-M design but much improved.
The Core2Duo performs faster than the Athlon64/X2 chips on a clock for clock basis, in most tasks. It's generally now got the performance lead, however it's still in low availability so it's still much more expensive. That'll change eventually, and AMD will need to find a way to fight back. But you may start to see Core2Duo computers sitting on retail shelves, at least the more expensive machines, and maybe the Athlons will be the cheap models.
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