That's true, but that doesn't change the argument people had back then about how unimportant power consumption was.The difference with Fermi was while it was hotter and used more power, the GTX480 was the fastest single GPU around. AMD manage to be worse in all metrics for performance parity at best.
I'm currently on nVidia GPUs, I haven't bought an AMD GPU in a long time. I don't care that nVidia are more power efficient, in a general context. I'm not buying AMD until they're good enough, and unfortunately for me they still haven't got to that point. If they beat nVidia on performance, then I'd get an AMD card. The paper efficiency is only an academic factor that's interesting to talk about in the context of architecture, and then to OEMs when putting chips in tight spaces.
But equally, I'm not buying anything nVidia at the moment either because their current cards are straight up trash and have no value to me.
I personally don't see the 2080Ti as being a worthy upgrade to the 1080Ti/Titan X Pascal.
I currently have a Titan X Pascal that I got for around the same price as a 1080Ti just as the prices of GPUs started going mental because of mining.
I can see me having this card for a while longer until AMD or nVidia release an actual upgrade that isn't holding a delusional price tag.