jpeyton has been clear as a bell. What I think that gets lost in these forums is that most who frequent have above-average computer skills and some of these guys are damned-scary with what they know (as evidenced by their ability to simply reach this forum, create an account, log in successfully, post/reply to a post and most importantly, have a computer problem that they are willing to fix themselves). The point is, less than half of America is even on the internet much less having the knowledge to understanding the benefits of 2 cores on one chip. Right now, AMD is cheap. They are expanding their business to reach the common man (non-oc'ing, non-game playing, basic email and browsing). I cannot tell you how many times someone will ask me for advice on their broken system and when I ask 'what kind of computer is it' they say 'dell' or 'hp' or 'compaq'. Prodding further, I ask them more invasive questions and their answers are usually something like '120gigawatts?' I assume they mean they have a 120gig hard-drive but you can never be sure. These are the people that AMD is expanding with. The people who are buying computers for their 10yr old grand-daughter. People being forced, kicking and screaming, into the future with the automation of systems that were pen-and-paper for much of their lives. I'm sure many of these consumers have bought lesser-known brands of cars, clothing, food, etc. And for $350 (not a huge investment - certainly not like in the days of CRT monitors and desktop systems that cellphones now out-perform), the AMD does EVERYTHING that the intel will do for $500 and it's $150 cheaper. They have no idea how fast their hard-drive spins. They would rather have a 4200RPM 160gig drive than a 74gig raptor (and they will never use 20 gigs on their drive because the only thing they put on it are word-docs and digital pics - if they can use a digital camera). MORE SPACE=BETTER COMPUTER. A 3.0ghz P4 sounds better to them than a 1.8ghz Opteron. MORE GHZ=BETTER COMPUTER. Efficiency has no place in their decision.
C2D makes no sense to these folks. And they are the VAST majority of PC users in this country (and I would imagine, the world). Hell, as someone already said, C2D makes no sense to me and I'm a fairly advanced user/gamer (if these people are baseline users)
So what is being said by jpeyton makes perfect sense to me. A 'desktop user' is what he is talking about. Most of the people here are 'enthusiasts' and represent a very small percentage of overall owners.