when exactly did they make the decision to rename the 8800gt to the 9800gt, and isn't one of the gts240 a reworked 9800gt? i'd say thats when, as soon as they took the first step in the direction that made it less shitty for ati to do the same, and bad business if they didn't do the same cost cutting measures as their direct rivals. at least it would appear to be bad business to some of the share holders, who are what really matter, which is why it's happening now on amd's side.
So ATi renaming the X550 to the X1050 didn't happen then? I guess renaming the X1300XT to x1650Pro didn't either, and they definitely didn't rename the x1600 Pro to x1650...
And remind you, this was back in the day when adding a 50 to the numbers was signifigent enough to distiquish between generations. Back when doing a die shrink, or similar to aid performance, meant you want from an x1900 to an x1950 name, instead of today where that is enough to leap an entire generation in naming. In the naming system today, then x1950 would have been called the X2900. Or with the examples I used, the x1650 would have been called the x2650 if the naming style of today was used.
Oh, and then there was the x1900GT. Which they reworked after release to reduce performance, kind of like the 9600GSO that everyone likes to harp on. Oh, and they did the same thing with the HD 2900 Pro, secretly dropping it from a 512-bit memory bus to a 256-bit memory bus after the initial batch had shipped, severaly cripping it, likely because it performed too closely to the x2900XT, and in reality could be flashed to an x2900XT, but crippling the memory bus killed 2 birds with one stone there.
So are you still sure it was nVidia that started it all?
And before anyone gets in a huff, I'm not pointing fingers at ATi here either. I honestly don't know who was the first one to rename a GPU to fill a gap in the next generation, my knowledge doesn't go back that far(and I'm too lazy to do the research). For all I know it could have been VooDoo. My point is that they both have been doing it, the G92 rebadges were not the first by a long shot, they were just the first(or maybe just most recent) where people actually caught on and publicised it.