Both AMD and Intel have been at the 125/130W TDP for a while on the high end. As long as they are improving on their mainstream TDPs, I think its GREAT we have powerful options available to us. Let the people choose..
Folks gripe on Intel about having different platforms, but I think its really starting to make more sense. AMD kind of already has 2 'tiers' in their MBs anyway, those can take the higher-TDP CPUs (X6s and BDs) and those that cannot. By Intel keeping the TDP manageable on most consumer CPUs (1155) it ensures that all boards will run these fine. Want more CPU power, get the enthusiast socket.
Bah. I don't want to go back to the days of $600-$1000 CPUs being what you needed for high end stuff, so I will respectfully disagree. I have little doubt that Intel could have made a 100W IVB Six core part with reasonable clock speeds. I am guessing those sweet profit margins on LGA2011 made that less of a priority, especially considering where AMD is right now perf/watt.
The vast majority of AMD boards can run all levels of CPUs. It's more an issue of BIOS support for Thuban/BD that is the issue. The high-end X2's used plenty o' power back in the day.
For years now, $200 has brought home a great CPU, whether that was the e6400 when C2D came out, Core 2 Quad for quite some time, the i7-920/i5-750/760 for quite a while, and finally that epic win the 2500k represents.
TDP has been 95-125W on desktop SKUs for quite a while and idle/low load power usage keeps getting more and more modest so I don't see why we can't keep that for the foreseeable future. You can always put a low power CPU in that socket.