I don't understand the negativity, but I suppose I rarely do.
There are usually 4 or so chips (sometimes more if notebooks get their own dedicated parts) in a full generational lineup, we have known for some time that this would be the case for AMD with polaris and vega (a big and small of each). GP100(2), GP104, GP106, and GP108 have been expected for as long. Low end, mainstream, high end, and enthusiast (or whatever names we colloquially designate to the tiers)
Why then, is everyone losing their minds when these companies went with differing strategies and released products that targeted different markets? One released their mainstream, the other their high end. I don't know which strategy is right (halo effect vs volume targeting) but we will find out by next year at this time.
Can you imagine if AMD's mainstream part (chip 2 of 4) competed with GP104, leaving 2 full chips (perhaps 4 SKUs) ABOVE it in performance? A world where that is true is a world where NVidia is as far behind AMD as AMD was during the 8800GTX days... To expect that with any semblance of rationality is a joke.
I want to upgrade to a 1440p ultrawide, I want to have adaptive frame rate tech with it and I don't want to pay the g-sync premium. I would have much preferred if AMD released Vega first so I know how it stacks up with GP104 and I can get on with upgrading my 970, but that has absolutely no bearing on if the RX 480 is a good card or not. Mainstream is not 'for' us (folks on a tech forum).
To add, folks assuming the clock speed is more determined by process tech than design targets is dumbfounding.... There are people assuming that pascal not clocking as high as GP104 means Zen will have bad clock scaling compared to intel for crying out loud! Maybe GloFlo is awful, and I look forward to MONTHS from now when we can compare the entire product stack of AMD to Nvidia to see if that is the case (but even then it could be that GCN1.4 just isn't as good as pascal...). Most of the 900 series clocks a good 20-30% higher (boost) than its competing products and that was on the exact same process...