Or the consumer can just get fed up, say "screw you Intel" and not buy a system at all. I firmly believe in a declining market, companies need to provide products that better accommodate the wants and needs of the consumer rather than limiting their choices. When computer were not powerful, there was a strong need to upgrade with every generation, and it was easy to get away with these tactics. Now, most computers are good enough, and there are strong alternatives from Apple and android. Consumers can easily pick those or just not upgrade at all. Intel needs to do everything within reasonable business practices to give the consumer a reason to upgrade, not artificially limit their choices to try to wring out a few cents more profit.
I agree! I'm not buying Skylake, at least currently, because of these tactics of Intel. No reason to move off of Haswell, that I can see.
This stance may change, should memory overclocking prove possible on H170. At least then, I can buy an i3, and faster DDR4 memory, with the knowledge that Intel isn't arbitrarily crippling 25% of my CPU performance, just because I refuse to pay their "tax" for the Z170 chipset, when I have no immediate plans for an M.2 PCI-E x4 SSD. (Although, the ASRock H170M Pro4 does have an Ultra M.2 slot.)
Edit: I just ran the numbers, and even then, an i3 Skylake isn't worth the upgrade. I'm currently on a Haswell G3258 @ 4.0Ghz, with 8GB of DDR3-1600 (of which, thanks to Intel's crippling, will only run at a max of 1400 in this board / CPU combo). Anyways, my current CPU + board cost $90, and 8GB of DDR3-1600 was around $50-60 when I got it. So a total of $150 for CPU/mobo/RAM.
Looking at a Skylake i3, 16GB DDR4, and an ASRock H170 mATX board, would be around $300-320. So twice the price, for... not nearly twice the performance?