Being in the business to sell servers, storage, networking and virtualization, seems to me Intel is in a dam good spot. memory, networking hard drives, even VMware (the virtualization) Intel has the least amount of competition. Memory and Hard drives are highly competitive. In the virtualization space, VMware has a few competitors, but Intel has few viable competitors that, even if another company could deliver CPU's of equal capability, few could reach the scale of a company like Intel for a long time. Ironically, it is virtualization that may be responsible for Intel's slide, as virtulization allows 70-90% increase of efficiency on the utilization of CPU resources, thus fewer CPU's are needed.
Just ranting out loud.