The "core count" argument is always a "chicken and egg" type of discussion. Not worth even going into it. The only important aspect there is, for there to be progress you need either the chicken or the egg to exist.
Seems like AMD is pushing to have one on the market and use it as a competitive advantage that, while Intel has been dominating the benches, devs have had no real incentive to do much (and also the tooling, which is mostly Intel centric, like it or not) hasn't helped out much outside of the corporate world.
That being said, 8C/16T are still good and will be good for a while, so while Intel may not have a counter to the 8+ core count CPUs, I do believe that concentrating their TDP in performance per core is a better move than going wide this time around. Their 14nm anchor is heavy as their horrible stubbornness about NOT DROPPING THEIR FRIGGIN iGPU from their upper-mainstream CPU designs. That's a lot of die real-state they're just flushing down the toilet.
Cheers!