First rule of engagement : You cannot sell your products if you dont have any products in the market.
The APUs were and still are great for Laptops, yet there are only a hand full of AMD Kaveri APU laptops in Germany, USA but none here in Greece. You can only find one or two Dual Core overpriced Beema/Mullins laptops here. 99% of Laptops are Intel based here.
Exactly. Had AMD done 5 years ago with their APUs, what Intel did in the past year with
Baytrail tablets, even on a much smaller scale, they would be very relevant in the laptop market, and probably to a smaller extent in the tablet market, today.
They were already being forced to buy CPUs from Global Foundries. They could have offered to just completely give away a certain portion of their APUs, but only if they were going to be installed into laptops/AIOs that had dual-channel RAM that was fast enough to give the APU some performance, and a lower-than-1080P screen.
Had they done this with a mid-level APU, with a mid-level iGPU, every teenage boy on the planet would have demanded that his parents buy him THAT laptop, instead of the similarly-priced Celeron or i3-based laptop that they were considering.
Once you create a market, unless you screw it up, you usually continue to have customers in said market. As long as your customers are happy with the first product they buy from you/with your product inside of it, they generally will continue to buy your product in their subsequent purchases of like type, such as a laptop. That's assuming they aren't the posting on Anandtech CPU/GPU forums type, like you and I.
Second : Consumer perception
AMD products are known to be inferior (to the average consumer) against Intel/NVIDIA no matter what.
This is only because it's very obvious (to that same average consumer) that if AMD were a competitive product, either quality-wise or performance-wise, they would be MUCH better represented in the laptop/OEM market. Had they done what I suggested above, they would be well-represented in the laptop/AIO market today. Too bad that Hector Ruinz was never interested in making AMD a successful company.