It seems like AMD can do no right recently: their Bulldozer chip was designed for a world that doesn't exist, and consequently is sometimes even outperformed by the old Phenom 2 Quads. Now we have this 7970, which by all account seems to be about 30-35% faster than a 6970, and (in terms of minimums) is only just ahead of the 40nm GTX580!
At 28nm you have roughly double the transistors per area compared with 40nm, yet the 7970, which is almost the same size as the 6970, is only 1/3 faster. It should be at least twice as far ahead of the 6970 even on immature drivers. Given that the 40nm GTX-580 is only just behind the 7970 specifically for minimums (which is really the only thing that matters), AMD is surely going to get destroyed when Nvidia moves to 28nm.
Think about it this way: For 3.4 billion transistors, AMD could have done no research at all and simply integrated two 6870s onto a single die (similar to 5870 vs 4870), ramping the clock speed up 20-30% to somewhere over 1Ghz (28nm would easily allow this). This would have produced performance somewhere close to a 6990, and far ahead of the 7970. Instead, AMD have spent lots of money on research and used 4.1 billion transistors to produce performance far worse than a 6990.
There has to be something wrong with a company when the fruits of their research are far worse than if they hadn't bothered doing any.
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