currently the lead belongs to intel, at least in the mid to high end range. In the low end range there is some debate about who is better but my personal opinion is that AMD has a little bit better processors at the low end then intel does.
having set up a intel box with a E2160 just recently i d'have to disagree... if you are into tweaking the E2140-E2200 totally blow the amd counterparts out of the water in price-performance
even with the stock cooler you can increase the clock ridiculously high without the fan speeding up or without increasing voltage
I am glad that intel is doing so well, but AMD really needs to kick it into gear. Intel has been slow to release there 45nm desktop processors (e8200, e8400, and e8500) cause AMD cannot and does not have anything that can compete with the current offerings. Hopefully AMD can kick it into gear and we can see some competition.
the problem currently also is that nearly all CPUs from intel have still a lot of air upwards available in term of clock rate (400mhz on pretty much all cpus) so even if amd came out with a good cpu intel simply had to release a new "version" running at higher clock
and if nehalem at end of year will be the big step forward everybody expects AMD might be in problems .. especially on the server cpu side which is still comparable to intel
edit: and that's coming from somebody who sweared by AMD a few years ago ...