Personally, I'd love it if Intel returned to their roots and offered genuine value.
Instead of a new chipset/socket/fsb every 2 months, why not give us a solid and stable chipset (remember the 440BX) and the potential to upgrade the board over -say- two years.
If AMD/nVidia/VIA/ATI can mature an athlon platform, why can't intel mature their CPU platform? I bought my 939 board last year with the intention of upgrading the CPU in a years time. And what do you know, I did. AMD promised that the 939 platform would support dual-core with a bios update, and that is what happened for me.
As for intel, well, I am waiting for them to figure out what they are doing. It doesn't matter what the performance level is, I want to be able to "upgrade" over time. The tech presented at this year's IDF sounds really promising, but what will the end result be? Will intel give us a chipset/socket/cpu/ram standard that is upgradable or disposable?
Case in point:
With the P4, Intel pushed Rambus as the ulimate bandwidth solution (and arguably, designed the P4 specifically for that memory standard) and offered PC133 as the "value" solution. Within a years time, Intel all but abandoned Rambus (much to the dismay of those who bought RDRAM systems *) for DDR and changed the socket. A year later, new socket. Then Intel stuck with the same socket, but changed the chipsets so that only certain chipsets supported certain processors, so to upgrade your CPU you had to upgrade your board. And then Intel changed the memory standard (and the socket) so that to use certain CPUs you had to upgrade your board and your Ram. And then dual-core came out, and (surprise) new chipset...
In that time AMD had 3 sockets, 2 memory standards, 2 families of CPUs. Simple, easy, and upgradable. AMD was also kind enough to migrate their "value" cpus to the elder sockets. Sempron is available in socket A and 754 flavours. Rumour has it that Sempron with appear in 939 guise once the M2 socket is released
If Intel did something similar, I might actual consider buying a setup as their was "value" in the purchase. As it is, I can see intel releasing the new cpu with a chipset using DDR2 in an ATX format. And then forcing the market to move to DDR3 (remember that twit from MS talking about Vista requirements. I'm sure he "spilled the beans" about Intels future plans) and BTX a year later.
As it is, AMD seems to offer the most value. I don't have buckets of cash to spend on a system, so I want to be able to get the most out of what I spend.
* The RDRAM chapter really enraged quite a few CTOs I know. They spent large sums migrating to the new platform only to find that it had no upgrade path. The most common upgrade to a system in the business environment is RAM. RIMMs were rare when the P4 was sold with RDRAM (usually available only in the lowest speed grade). Once Intel dropped support, the supply dried up. It's funny, while you can get PC133 anywhere today, getting RDRAM is expensive and difficult (online only).