HyperThreading may seem "lol" but the fact is Intel's CPU's are powerful enough that even with it being a kind of hacked on feature they shine. The numbers don't lie;
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/434?vs=287
Basically the new design caused a hit on per thread performance but you now could run 8 threads so it was supposed to be an even trade off. The downside was they didn't consider that most applications (if someone brings up compiling or video-editing I will choke them, you are incredibly niche and make up less of the market than gamers even) do not use more than 2-4 threads, so Intel's offerings and even AMD's older offerings were better. Not sure why but Tom's Hardware also noticed the
FX series bottlenecked GPU's like crazy.
I hope Vishera is a marked improvement at least for AMD's sake. I honestly am pretty pleased with having gone for SB instead of waiting for BD :x
Role-reversal is fun like that. I wouldn't say BD "shines" in anything. I'm sure I'll get crucified for that, but everything I've seen indicates that in an optimal environment (basically one that heavily favors AMD) it is at least on par for SB\IB chips, but the remaining 90%+ of the time Intel edges them out. I would say this is kind of more troubling for AMD than Netburst was for Intel. Intel had tons of capital and a massive market share, so gambling on a new architecture was acceptable. AMD really has neither of those, so BD being released in the condition it was in was a huge risk. Luckily their GPU and APU sales are doing great.