Ultimately, the likes of Dell, although they might have, of their own volition, used AMD, were always going to be Intel shops.
So, Intel was paying Dell essentially up to $1 Billion a year to not carry AMD just for fun? They were not going to go AMD anyway, even though they were so much faster, cooler and even cheaper?
Back in 2003-2004 we wanted to buy a few dozen servers for our lab at my University. My professor who had gotten the grant had gotten offers from various companies, Dell offering Xeon-based ones and others (HP and Sun I think?) offering Opteron-based. I was given remote access to a sample Dell server and a sample Opteron server (sorry I forget exactly what it was), and was asked to benchmark them. So, I benchmarked with the actual software we were using. The fact that the Xeons back then were 32bit while the Opterons were 64bit added to the speed difference and made a devastating difference. Sure, our natural language processing suite written in Perl was not getting much of the 64bit benefit, so it was "only" about 40% faster on the AMD server, but any of the computational-biology C code was over 2x faster. I gave my report and the Professor was going to go with an AMD server, when Dell came back and gave him a quote at less than half the price. They were actually selling each server less than what just the CPU was supposed to cost. I could not understand how they could do that. Well, now we know how.
Oh, to finish the story, the Professor told me he would go with Dell and buy more since they were so cheap and we would end up with more processing power. I warned him about the fact that the Dells were producing more heat and having even more of them would be a problem. It was hard to say no to such a good deal though, so the school bought the Dells. Then they had to wait for an upgraded electrical and air-conditioning system to be installed since the head/power requirements went up. It was a State University so it took almost a year. Also, the Dell file servers had a bunch of disks too close together and a dual Xeon throwing hot air over them, so a second disk would probably fail before the RAID array could restore from the previous disk failure. But most of those 100+ Dell servers are still running. Sure they are about as fast as a P4 that your knowledge-able friends made fun of even back then, but at least there is a LOT of them...
To return from the digression, my point when I started replying was that if the market was free, Intel would not have all that money and all those years (eternity for CPU manufacturing) to surpass AMD. AMD would have been the one selling and making money in the meantime, which would have meant more R&D for themselves to maintain a lead.
Anyway, let's hope we will never return to the thousand-dollar prices for desktop CPUs we were enjoying back in the good ol' Intel-only days.