Well I guess that makes sense. Either way, if you know of a good cross platform benchmarking tool I think it'd be sweet (I haven't booted Snow Leopard, like I said, but I've run it in a virtual machine as a 'windows' installation, as a proof of concept, and have installed it, thus removing it because I didn't have the space, to see if I could do it.)
I know the Phenom II 965 is supposed to beat the i7's of that generation, except for the Extreme Edition (a $1000 CPU, but it's beats the $500 CPU, and I paid $189 for it.), so I would be interested to see how it fares against the next generation i7 mobile CPU.
Although, currently, Intel does have the lead (I was looking through some benchmarks), in encoding and that sort of thing, but it's very marginal (1-3 seconds difference in some tasks, for example), and the cost difference is often half or less to go with AMD. There have been times when AMD struggled to boot a PC much less compete with Intel, and there have been times where it creamed Intel, but right now they are so close on many of their products it's not even funny, so why pay double? Not to mention, in my experience (granted, I was shopping for one particular system configuration, it might be different along the mid or low range or something), the motherboards have also been more expensive on the Intel side, AND with less features!
-John