What AMD sells is more than hardware, it is hardware + brand + support + ecosystem. If they have a problem in developing the other components of their products, be it for outright incompetence or for lack of proper resources allocated to the task, they can only blame themselves and themselves alone.
Goes back to my earlier point. I've used ATI, AMD and NV cards over 15 years. I've seen it all, SLI, CF issues, bugs, artifacts, crashing on both brands. I don't see any superior support from NV considering Watch Dogs SLI is still broken, and SLI was stutter fest for well over a year in FC3, broken for 6 months in Shogun 2. AMD had its share of CF issues with HD7000 frame pacing, but Fermi was ridden with single GPU frame pacing problems and not 1 site picked this up despite this evident in TechReport's own charts! How many sites have reported that Tri- and Quad-SLI setups have major scaling and stuttering issues? The small ones did like PCPer, Linus and HardOCP. You see high end users admitting how poor 3- and 4-way SLI is vs. Tri-Fire or Quad-Fire? Not a chance. That's not going to happen after that person spent $2000+ on those cards. You need objective professional reviewers who aren't biased to point this out. Glad they still exist.
Both brands have their share of issues and bugs. In one case I am asked to pay more for what to me is a similar experience in games, with both requiring compromises. You get blurfest TXAA, I get by far the superior SSAA, you get PhysX, I get more VRAM which gives me higher textures, you say NV drivers are awesome but 7990 at only 1.05Ghz blows 690 away in latest games by 20-30%. 3D Vision is cool but I personally hate 3D gaming. For someone who likes it, I would recommend NV for sure.
You talk about NV's professional support. The consumer support for Kepler went MIA in the last 5-6 months. As I said before Fermi NV's IQ, including 2D was attrocious. You paint a picture of NV being superior for 20+ years but in fact there were plenty of generations (GF5 and 7) were only a fanboy or hard core flight sim/OpenGL user would buy their cards. GF5 and 7 were absolute garbage in both performance and IQ. I never saw NV's market share go down to 10% during those years. Neither did I see NV users fleeing to AMD in the millions when HD5000 mopped the floor with GTX200 series for 6 months. It took a whopping 9 months for GTX460 to come out after a $259 5850! It took 6-9 months for the entire Kepler desktop line up to come out and yet NV gained market share despite not having 650/650Ti/660/660Ti for months. That's right, NV gained market share with old550/560SE/560/560Ti/570 against 7750/7770/7850/7870, something that in hindsight is nearly impossible to comprehend considering how much more inferior 1-1.28Gb Fermi cards are today against GCN 1.0.
There is a double standard. AMD users will get an NV card if it's good and is priced right. NV users will not. That's why the idea of AMD fanboys is questionable as most of us buy based on value, overclocking and enthusiast features. Once I upgrade to 4K, whoever gives me better performance per $ is getting my money. I don't even think about the brand. The only thing that may give me pause is GSync vs. FreeSync, but hopefully NV adopts FreeSync so I don't have to be forced into supporting a closed proprietary standard.
If Apple were to buy AMD, drop all NV cards from its products, rebrand all AMD Radeon to Apple i-series, NV's market share would drop so fast, they wouldn't know what hit them. The problem with AMD is AMD not the technical characteristics or drivers of its products. Right now the Radeon brand is being dragged down by negative association with AMD CPUs.
Even when professional sites such as PCPer or HardOCP state that CF is now smoother than SLI, even enthusiasts on our forums ignore it. No one makes a big deal about blur with super-sampling on NV cards or how you can mix and match monitors of different sizes and resolutions with AMD for games -- something you can't do with NV. Pretty much every advantage AMD has had from perf/watt, better CF, better 2D, better MSAA quality, dual bioses, ASIC voltage unlock, generally more VRAM, strong game bundles have been ignored since 2008. I mean all those hyping up perf/watt are straight up hypocrites as the same users were running GTX200/400/500 series. NV hasn't been competitive in performance/watt until Kepler but since Kepler this metric became THE most important one.
It would be a lot better instead of all the bickering if the NV loyalists like toyota just admitted "Yes, I will only buy NV". It's a lot more honest and respectful than trying to make up AMD factors having not used their cards for years or hyping up how NV is better at nearly everything whole ingoring all the key areas where AMD was better since 2008. Perhaps some gamers started with NV 10-15 years ago and to them it's like buying toothpaste, toilet paper or laundry detergent -- I've used this brand for a deace or more and it works, so why other switching? That's why I said AMD will not win those types of customers.