This is what Keys said he couldn't stop smiling about, eh? A card with a bit more performance six months late that runs games at 92C and consumes almost twice the power? Fail. I can't see ATI really beating Fermi with a new single GPU SKU, but I can see one that ties Fermi with a lot lower power consumption. On the other hand, HD 5970 consumes less power, has a fair bit more performance, and might even cost less to make, so maybe they'll price drop it (at current prices it loses to Fermi for bang for the buck) and put on the squeeze that way.
This feels like R600 all over again if that card's AA performance wasn't broken and ATI decided to get the performance crown no matter how much cooling and how many watts the broken thing put off.
ATI has just plain out engineered NVIDIA, like NVIDIA outengineered them in G80 vs. R600 but to a slightly lesser extent. Hopefully, like R600, Fermi will lay the groundwork for a new line of revolutionary GPUs despite the fact that the original kind of sucks.
Hate to say it, but it looks like Charlie was spot on for once (his 5% faster claim being from 512SP 600MHz parts, this is exactly where one would expect a 480SP 700MHz part to be). I think that makes it 2 Charlie (bump gate, albeit exaggerated, and Fermi) 1 Nvidia (G80).