Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

[gosh]

But the reviewers are reviewing video cards, not processors. If they used a Phenom, most likely at best it would show the 4870 X2's tied with the nVidia 280 and 260 since the games will all bunch up to the limit of the CPU.

Do you think that AMD isn't able to run 8800GT? That was a fast card not that long ago

If one game is only using one thread then I agree with you, the cpu would bottleneck the system if the video card is very fast. But do you really think that games that are using two or more cores effectively are going to be main bottleneck on advanced graphics?
And this thing about the CPU or GPU bottlenecks the system. When application runs they are using different types of work, they sometimes(?) is using the CPU and sometimes it sends data to the GPU. It is very hard to balance workloads and use all hardware in order to hide bottlenecks. Threads need to be synchronized. If one thread is running very fast but that thread needs to wait for another thread it doesn’t matter, the slower thread will delay it. If you have bigger threads (they do more) then it is harder to estimate how fast the work is done. If you have one main thread than it might be easier. I think crysis and some other games are done like that. You will se work among other cores but one core is going crazy, this isn’t going to use the CPU as much (all four cores). New games may use other techniques, they need to do that in order to take advantage of the all the cores.
How the game performs depends on the design. Maybe one game does the all the calculation of how the "image" is displayed using four threads. When all these threads are ready they may use one thread that sends the data to the video cards, when this thread is sending data the speed needs to be high. In between it may not be that much traffic(only memory but they are probably trying to optimize for cache hits). Games may use buffers etc to speed up but when I look at how hard the CPU is working it is very rare to see 100% on one core.

EDIT. About anand and nehalem. OF COURSE intel knew that they got the processor, the journalist would otherwise had done a crime and maybe some responsible persons at intel would be kicked because the security was that bad.