I see this as a benefit to AMD in the short term, even over the new Nehalem-based Xeons. A drop-in quad-core Opteron is a significant improvement over a dual-core, especially when the alternative is to upgrade anything-else to a brand new Xeon with a brand new motherboard and brand-new registered DDR3 memory.
While the move to an integrated memory controller was a must, Intel kinda picked a bad time to do it, but its not their fault for the recession.