The fact that it's a marketing ploy is obvious, it's written on the wall. They want to boast the 5GHz number and sure, go ahead, but I disagree that people will mindlessly see 5GHz and flock to AMD. People who were burnt with that the first time with Bulldozer learned their lesson. They will know to research ahead of time. The Bulldozer debacle also created enough of a stir in the community that just about everyone knows that the Bulldozer arch isn't as good, even with higher clocks than Intel and in a lot of cases, even not as good as their old Stars architecture. I believe that most people who are looking to purchase FX chips are enthusiasts and know exactly what they are buying. 5GHz, although a high clock and a first for a stock part isn't all that great once you know that it's AMD's architecture.
Now, to say that it will beat a 3770K at stock across the board is plainly and simply wrong.
Feel free, like I did, to go ahead and calculate the performance, adding 20% (and that's being generous as performance doesn't scale linearly with clock speed) to any of the AMD FX8350 benchmarks and you will find that
most of the time (note that I did not say all), even with the additional 20%, the FX8350 still performs worse than the 3770K, although it is close, with the FX8350 winning in some of the more multithread focused benchmarks.
The problem is simply with the architecture. IPC has been AMD's biggest problem since they decided to go modular. It wasn't even as good as their old architecture. They made some improvements with the Piledriver update, but it just wasn't enough.
Steamroller with it's providing each core with it's own instruction decoder instead of having to share one, with both of these decoders being able to operate in parallel instead of having to alternate every other cycle, will finally create IPC greater than Stars cores and something that will finally compete with Intel. That is what I will be upgrading to when it comes out.
People like me are not going to waste their money on Piledriver cores when we could just go and get a 2600K, 3770K, or 4770K, or wait for Steamroller and finally have a better performing rig.
Here, I took a slide from Anand and added a Steamroller column for comparison. You can see why Steamroller will finally be the change everyone will want.
http://imageshack.us/a/img89/1750/steamrollerdecodingg.png