I think we may be in the midst of watching a graphics giant fall (don't laugh it's happened before). I've always been fairly vendor neutral (motherboards, GPUs, soundcards, etc., etc., though I do tend to favor Intel platforms performance being equal or better even with a price premium), in fact I'm pretty certain I've owned at least two nVidia GPUs for every one ATI GPU I've owned. However, nVidia's actions as of late have left a very, very bad taste in my mouth. Enough so that I honestly don't know if I can bring myself to purchase a product from them again.
I'm running a 4890 at the moment so I wasn't really terribly pressed to jump at the first upgrade that came along. I was planning to wait it out and see what NV had to offer this generation before upgrading, I don't care to now. I'm just going to wait on the 5870 X2 and grab that. Stuff like this will hurt nVidia, and they just keep adding fuel to the fire. Remember, over time the mainstream follows the enthusiasts and you can plainly see from recent threads here and similar sites the vendor agnostic, middle of the road'ers are up in arms about recent happenings. Which way do you think they are leaning now?
Soon enough nV will have to also deal with the 800lb gorilla in the room as well. Now like most I don't really believe Intel's initial entry into the discrete GPU market is going to be all that spectacular, but I also don't think they are going to quit this time like they did previously. They do have the clout and money to push nV around. What would the nVidia zealots say about vendor lockouts then? "We're sorry, we just can't assure the reliable operation of CPU turbo mode/dual-triple channel memory/16X pci-e mode etc. while using GPUs manufactured by non x86 licensed vendors."