You are right. Great value like a 7970 for $549 with no free games and beta drivers for 10months. How could anyone forget that deal.
That's a smoking deal. Each HD7970 OC made
$1.5-3k in 1.5 years bitcoin mining if you flipped at the right times. Even if you didn't sell until today, with 3 7970s, you'd be sitting on a
minimum of 4.5K of coins at current rates if you started mining any time from January to June 2012 and didn't stop or sell even once. This is conservative too because in early months the difficulty was low allowing 7970 to make 6-7 coins a month. If you didn't sell, at current rates those early coins made from Jan - Jun 2012 net $600-700 a month!! If you knew what you were doing, with less than 5 cards, you got 10-20 years of
free GPU upgrades. HD7970 is the greatest GPU ever made for this reason, period. And before you say anything about people buying GPUs for games, buy 6 cards and mine on 5.
Comparing the price of HD7970 and whining about it makes no sense since for US/Canadian gamers, there were periods in time when the 7970 was clearing $200 in profits per month. For those of you living in Europe with high electricity prices you won't get this point ever. Regardless, even with AMD's less than optimized drivers, HD7970 OC kept up easily with GTX680 and after June 2012, it outperformed it in playability - framerate delivery and latency.
http://techreport.com/review/23150/amd-radeon-hd-7970-ghz-edition/11
There were a few games like Skyrim and BF3 that had issues on AMD cards but for the most part, HD7970 OC cleaned up GTX680 in overall playability by June 2012. Of course until this day you keep denying this despite reviews showing this to be the case.