This was not unexpected: Comet-Lake is SKL silicon and the I/O is still gen3. However, if they could at least double the width of the DMI interface that would be nice? 24 lanes on Z390 but you can only use 1 NVME at full gen3 4x speed at a time... Also If the 10th-gen parts are priced well, they will obviously be good products. Now if Rocket Lake supports Gen4 on the CPU, and potentially the first 16x slot on these boards? It would make sense for Intel to do that IMO. This is similar in nature to the jury-rigged Gen4 capable X470 boards.
The delay is bad news for Intel, like, really bad. Lisa Su has already confirmed Zen3 this year, and this uses 7nm+ with EUV and I expect another double-digit IPC increase - even if the clock rates remain the same - the performance uplift will already be pushing it ahead of Comet Lake, even on a core to core basis.
So at the end of the day, it comes down to price now. And Intel must realise that they are no longer the premium CPU brand, and adjust their prices accordingly. But can they afford to do that? Being fabless has worked out very well for AMD, and Zen2's chiplet design makes it very economical even on a leading-edge process technology. AMD nailed not only the uArch, but the scalability and economics.
I don't think Intel can afford to wage a price-war with AMD, because they are also paying for R&D &maintaining their fabs and sunk-cost of their 10nm development and 7nm, whilst also funding 7nm... High prices are not just greed with Intel: their long-term profit margins are eaten into by the aforementioned factors, whereas AMD just buys wafers from TSMC: their R&D of said wafers and manufacturing is highly subsidised by TSMC's other clients, also.
Zen3 is rumoured to have a unified L3 cache system, each chiplet with a single monolithic (I assume) 32 MB L3 cache. Obviously, each core is not going to be able to access that entire chunk at the same low latency (unless the lookup tables are HUGE) but if these 8 cores can communicate with each other faster via the cache rather than going to the I/OD like on Zen2, further latency reductions in gaming scenarios could be made. What if Zen3 is actually more performant in the typically Intel-held bastion of ultra high-FPS gaming?
TLDR: i9-10900K for $399, $449 tops, please. Thanks Intel.