It also takes away from their competitive aspect if performance is similar to the competition but the competition can just overclock and perform better.
Being able to get marginally better performance for double the price does not seem particularly competitive to me. You're not getting anything for free either, since Intel's charging an extra $50+ for the ability to overclock a processor, plus extra for an overclocking-capable chipset, in addition to them not even supplying a cooler for those parts. AMD offering i7-like performance for $200, and i9-like performance for $330, along with reasonably capable coolers for all of their processors, definitely seems far more competitive no matter how one looks at it.
Perhaps when Intel slashes prices once again with their 10-series processors, offering similar thread counts as AMD at comparable price points, they may once again be competitive, so long as one is willing to put up with higher power draw and heat output for that bit of extra performance, along with what will probably be inadequate stock coolers on the locked parts, and no coolers on the unlocked parts.
As for performance, so far on apples to apples (not counting price) comparison (8 core to 8 core) Intel has a slight, very, advantage and the overclocking gives them a much larger advantage. If you go price to price then yes in more heavily multi threaded applications AMD has the advantage.
The performance differences from overclocking these processors are not all that large. A stock 9900K can boost up to 5.0GHz on a single core, down to 4.7GHz with all cores loaded. According to SiliconLottery, only 35% of 9900Ks were able to push a 5.0GHz or higher all-core overclock under their test criteria and 13% were not even able to hit 4.9GHz, but assuming one is willing to use higher voltages and expensive cooling, we'll use 5.0GHz for our comparison. A 5.0GHz all-core overclock should result in roughly the same performance as stock for lightly-threaded workloads, up to around 6% higher performance at most in heavily threaded workloads utilizing all cores. And that's assuming perfect performance scaling, which usually isn't the case, especially in things like games, where the processor will be spending much of its time waiting for the graphics card either way.
And as far as heavily-multithreaded workloads go, you don't even have to go price to price. In many applications, a 3700X will outperform a 9900K. The two processors trade blows at application performance in general, performing similar overall. And this is for a new processor architecture that hasn't yet been optimized for. Unless the primary purpose of a system is to run one or more of those applications where the 9900K happens to pull slightly ahead, there is little reason to pay more for that processor.
And in terms of gaming performance, the Intel processors might still manage to edge out the competition in benchmarks, but only when pairing them with a very high-end graphics card at low-resolutions that few people would use them with. At practical resolutions for a given card, there will be little to no difference, and significantly more performance could be had by putting that money toward faster graphics hardware instead.
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