piesquared is not what I would call an AMD fanboy. Going by the general content of his contributions in this subforum I would be more apt to characterize him as an "anti-Intel fanboy".
He is a big fan of espousing anything that is anti-Intel, that just happens to coincidentally make it seem like he is pro-AMD, but if you check his posts you'll see he rarely posts to ooze over AMD. Mostly posts to state the shortcomings of Intel.
And nothing wrong with that, if there weren't any shortcomings to talk about then he wouldn't have the opportunity to bring them up.
That's Intels problem, hopefully they will address their shortcomings. Until they do it is folks like piesquared that do all of us a service by keeping their feet to the fire.
I think comparing Zambezi to Llano at the core level for operating voltage (speaks to the design for manufacturing, or DFM, efficiency), for upper-end clockspeeds, and for power-consumption at those clockspeeds is the best way to attempt to divine whether or not there is a 32nm issue holding bulldozer clockspeeds back.
Actually we (not you and me per se, but the community at large) had these same conversations for the months and months leading up to Zambezi's launch.
Noting the apparent step backwards that Llano took compared to Thuban in terms of normalized power-consumption and GHz, the argument was easy to make that bulldozer was not going to hit the 4.5GHz to 5Ghz clocks that were said to be needed for Zambezi to best a stock 2600K. (yes, even before launch, those were the clocks we were talking about it needing)
And so I think you are right in asserting that bulldozer's clocks, while falling slightly short of what was needed, are a testament to the capability of the microarchitecture in light of the canary in the coal-mine observation that Llano is in regards to the capability of GloFo's 32nm process tech.
It really is 65nm dejavu all over again. Remember 65nm Athlon X2's had problems just getting to the same clockspeeds of their 90nm siblings, and before Phenom even launched the biggest concern among enthusiasts was that the K10 would not be able to hit the intended clockspeeds because 65nm seemed to be a miss.