I don't want to council despair but I'm not as sanguine as you either. Intel has had disastrous microarchitectures before. Itanium, P4, and previous ones. But it's never had to worry about recovering from a process disaster before. It might very well be able to but I worry.
I'm not exactly optimistic either, I just think that the doomsaying is overblown (and sometimes looks like a tribal thing from Apple and AMD fans if I'm being honest - i.e. companies aren't your friends)
