@zanny: If IB is just the Intel "tick", then the "tock" that comes next will bring significant architecture changes... though the change in GPU performance would tend to conflict with this a bit...
I'm surprised at only 1-2 SATA III ports on these chipsets. I know the current HDDs can't come anywhere close to saturating a port (unless pulling from cache...), but if the peak for SATA II is ~265 MB/s (as observed during THW SSD tests, which is less than the 300 MB theoretical), then using a port multiplier to attach something like a DAS could quickly saturate a SATA II port. AMD can do 6 SATA III ports on their chipsets with port multiplier support... why not Intel?
Intel's marketing department is kind of screwing over the high-end enthusiasts, if I read this correctly. X79 doesn't have USB 3.0, barely has any SATA III, and has no lightpeak. And there does not appear to be any short-term remedy to this, short of using onboard add-on chips or PCIe cards. So mainstream gets better than what enthusiasts get (albeit a few months later), and Apple fans get even better than that (WHY?)
Speaking of which, where's thunderbolt / lightpeak? I would expect that to be appearing on some of these chipsets by now. Unless it's done as a PCIe device?