My takeaway on the 480 is that the Polaris chipset, at this level, is locked-in. With a few more driver tweaks, it might eak out a 3-5% gain but the ceiling is definitely unmovable or unavoidable. I think the Sapphire team saw this in their own testing when they were looking at how they'd position their card in the market. That's why they went with the Dual-X instead of the Tri-X system for cooling. Any other attempts at more efficient cooler would just be wasted.
So do you get this card, expecting to play more and more DX12 or Vulkan-enabled games in the next two to four years? You don't get 60fps on all games with all the bells and whistles enabled, so do you buy instead the 1060 to get all that on DX 11 games? Or, do you take a pass and hug your 7950 a little bit more and wait for Navi to potentially blow everyone's socks off?
Don't get me wrong, the idea of the 480 @ $200 made nVidia grit their teeth and push out the 1060 at a much lower price point they they had planned, that I'm pretty sure of. And for people with the old Ti's or 6 or 7-series Radeons, it's a big bump in performance and energy savings, so the card is very much welcomed. It's just now becomming apparent that this card will fill a specific niche without any room for growth.