How could anyone actually say - "hey, this is a good chip!" - I'm talking PRE Core2.
I don't recall the Prescott and Willamette lines actually being called "good" though... the first P4 release was pretty terrible IIRC, and it was only in subsequent revisions that it started turning heads. And even then it was because of crazy-high clock speeds more than other reasons (which we now, of course, know to be a dead-end path for increasing computational capability). But things were different back then.
IMO - these actions from Intel stagnated AMD pretty damn good. Intel: your friend. 
Certainly did. Although they paid quite a high price (in the billions) to settle those lawsuits, too. But I guess to them, it was probably worth it to get a step up in grabbing the market share they have now.
As much as Intel looks like the bad guy right now, I can't say I like AMD very much either. There's nothing to say for sure that AMD won't do the same thing if put in Intel's shoes. They're not much more innovative than Intel (post-Prescott era), they don't fix problems faster than Intel (Southbridge AHCI problems ever since SB600 and even with the current SB750, still no 7.1 LPCM on 785G), and they're no longer more power-efficient than Intel.
What are we to conclude then?
All microprocessor/chipset companies suck. Intel doesn't care about low prices enough, and they suck at graphics (compared to AMD/Nvidia). AMD still has many problems to fix on their chipsets, and quite a way to catch up with Nvidia on the chipset front, and Intel on the processor front. Nvidia is being overtaken by AMD/ATi on the gaming front when it comes to price/performance, and they have an annoying habit of rebranding their GPUs in a misleading way. ATi only cares about the gaming bottom-line and their support (hardware and API-wise) for GPGPU completely pales in comparison to Nvidia's.
On the flip side,
they're all awesome as well. Intel's really pushing the line on power efficiency and processor performance. AMD is near-unbeatable for budget systems with great performance (with some thanks to Intel for breathing down their necks), and the 785G is easily one of the best integrated graphics chipsets for the price. Nvidia is no slouch themselves in the chipset department, and proof of this lies in the ION platform/Geforce 9400 MCP, which performs amazingly for a chip that was rushed out of development. They're also pretty much your only resource if you're looking to go into GPGPU computing at the moment (at the time of this post, they're the only company to have publically released GPU APIs for C, Fortran
and OpenCL; DirectCompute is on the way). And in contrast with Nvidia's strong software support, ATi is definitely the leader when it comes to value-for-money gaming video hardware, as GPU benchmarks on reviews everywhere are already pointing out.
[This paragraph is only valid at the time of writing, and does not take unreleased products or future shifts in hardware prices into account.]All I can say now is, I'm glad that lawsuit is over, and Intel and AMD are no longer wasting money paying lawyers. Intel still has another legal battle ahead of it, but in the meantime I'm just glad less money is being spent on dealing with legalities. Hopefully it means more money spent on R&D and product development.
As a side benefit to AMD, I might point out that the Intel-AMD agreement also changes some of the terms that both companies have agreed on. In particular, AMD is no longer bound to manufacture their own x86 chips in-house, as was the case prior to this agreement (where the x86 cross-license between Intel and AMD required them to manufacture their x86 chips in-house, presumably to prevent technology leaks). This means they can free themselves from GlobalFoundries and focus solely on microprocessor R&D rather than manufacturing R&D; with a renewed focus on their core business, hopefully we'll see better chips from AMD, even if their roadmap has been pushed back by a year.
