There's two schools of thought on the rebranding concerning the GTX250 / GTX 280M, and both are correct, which is why there will never be a consensus on the rebranding.
1.) On the one hand, the GTS250 is a new card with lower power, a smaller PCB, higher performance, and 1GB of RAM. It performs close to a GTS 260 216 even. You get about what to expect extra from a minor product launch like this.
2.) On the other hand, the GTS250 uses G92 tech, not GT200 technology as the name implies (GTS 250), which is very misleading for those who have any knowledge about the G92/GT200 architecture.
For the people in group 1, their view is easily justified because what if the GTS 250 used the GT200 architecture that was either redesigned to have fewer pipelines/shader units, lower clockspeeds, or just even more shaders/pipelines disabled? The end result is the exact same - you get a card that performs exctly like a card with the name GTS 250 should.
For the people in group 2, their view is also logical because any card in the GT_ 2xx series should logically contain a GT200 architecture CPU.
The thing is, there aren't really major featureset differences between G92 and GT200 - they both support Direct X 10.0, etc. There are architectural improvements and optimizations, of course, but really, this is nothing but an argument of semantics.
Me personally, I do think that the GTS 250 card name is misleading, so I'm kind of in group 2, but with that said, it performs like a card with the name GTS 250 should, so I really don't think the name is that bad. The worry, of course, is the precedent that it sets; that there will eventually be a GT or GTS 220 or 230 or something like that that performs like total crap. But even then, it's a moot point, and it has no relevance towards the name of the GTS 250 card.
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To the argument that people with two 9800+ GTX SLI's will go to "upgrade" to a GTX 250; I think that's a very weak argument. I can understand the confusion of paying more for a GTS 250 over a 9800GTX+ (which frankly, the price difference is almost nothing), but if you are the kind of person who is buying two or three cards and putting them in SLI, then you should damn well do the research before plunking down hundreds of dollars on a complex setup like that.
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