The up-side to this is that M$ will have more reasons to improve DirectX thanks to Mantle, and thanks to NV pushing harder for it - they already rolled out DX11.2 for XBone (and Win8.1). NV didn't bother with full DX11.1 or DX11.2 support with the Kepler series, but don't be surprised if NV goes for DX12 with Maxwell.
Don't worry - Nvidia is always known to be a fiercely competitive company, so this will only drive NV "mad" in the spirit of competition. With a superb driver team, NV will try their hardest to work closely with the same game developers who code for Mantle for the PC, to ensure that their cards also perform well. NV definitely has more resources, after all. JHH was probably regretting not cementing in a console deal after showing up at AMD's event, but his mind is probably set on the Android market - the real killer that got Qualcomm sky-high, or on being like Samsung or even Google/Apple (not just dozens of billions of dollars, but more..) after disappointing business with the consoles in the past for tiny pocket change. Only if Qualcomm were still under AMD.......
One thing I dislike though is AMD's rumored statement that Stereo3D is a failure, that AMD will be focusing on 4k displays instead of S3D. To slack off in any department can really back-fire, just like it did with Intel's abandoning of the discrete GPU market only to have to license NV's tech later on.
What if Samsung indeed buys AMD? IBM could do that as well. Apple might too, but Apple's personality is just not anything like AMD at all. But then again, Apple just might, because AMD's net worth is meager pocket change. The company that should buy AMD the most is Qualcomm, IMHO.. with net worth of $115 billion, it doesn't hurt to snatch up every asset of AMD (2.78 billion plus ~2B debt), and digest every useful bit, then create hybrid x86/ARM PC's and everything else, etc... while even making an all-in-one console in the future, GPU cloud server farms, etc.. Man, I tell you - these cloud server farms are going to be a massively huge thing in the future. Microsoft could be another potential buyer.... AMD is still a diamond in the rough - Qualcomm came out of it, and look what Qualcomm turned into after some polishing/cutting. I wish I had $5 billion to buy AMD (while having some other assets), and then drive AMD into something bigger than Intel and Qualcomm and Samsung combined.