Yeah not really sure what you're getting at to be honest, as I don't disagree that clock speed on it's own is irrelevant... pretty sure I never said it was. My point was simply that AMD may be able to match Intel for IPC clock for clock, but having a chip 20% lower clocking put the advantage firmly back with Intel again.
As for the engineering sample, it showed awesome promise, but that was a threaded test which favours AMD as SMT is simply better than HT. I've zero doubts that had that test instead been gaming benchmarks, then the results would have certainly favoured Intel. Probably not by much, so this is why I'm hyped for the new series, especially the 12 and 16 core high clocking parts (if they clock as per leaked guesses and can do that all core). As for it's clockspeed being irrelevant, well, that's your opinion, I disagree. If it was 4.7 or whatever would show that there's zero IPC improvement and AMD have simply increased clocks, then that's bad... if it was 4.0ghz and the higher end parts are going to be 5.1ghz, then that's absolutely awesome.