Based on current leaks, the rx 480 should be placed at least at the same r9 390 non-x performance level. The question is: Who's going to purchase a 4GB gtx 980 old tech over a 8GB Rx 480 if they are priced the same and perform similarly? Who's gonna recommend a gtx980 over a 480? The gtx 970 is not even worth mentioning unless it gets dirt cheap compared to the rx 480.
The Nvidia brand definitely has significant effect on people's purchasing patterns when it comes to GPUs, so I wouldn't be surprised if at least some non-insignificant amount of people went for the 980 instead. Irrational perhaps, but then again most purchasing patterns for pretty much any good has some level of irrationality to them.
But when it comes to lurkers and how many people have viewed this topic it's not even close.
Sorted by views:
even sorted by # of replies this wins overwhelmingly"
I don't know. Currently the Pascal thread is sitting at 367,634 views or about 66% more than this thread. It isn't possible to see how many views the Pascal thread had before the NDA ended, but if we simply adjust for the number of pages at the time compared to now (142 vs. 164), then we would end up with ~318,000 views or about 44% more than this thread.
Looking at just replies, then the Pascal thread obviously wins, seeing as it had 3,529 replies before the NDA ended, or about 25% more than this thread, and a week before the NDA ended (i.e. same point in time as this thread is at now) it was sitting at 3,321 replies which is 18% more.
So as far as I can tell, the Pascal thread was more popular by pretty much any measurement you might go with.