I think you are overstating Phenom's competiveness, possibly on the basis of gaming benchmarks where being GPU limited made the Phenoms look closer than they really were.
I suspect most people buy a CPU wanting a bit of performance headroom for future games/applications, not just settling for what is good enough right now.
Whilst I disagree that is a reasonable summation of the various reasons for C2Q's success, I suspect that Dual Core C2's have hurt AMD far more than the Quads.The thing that pushed C2Q over the top, was it's overclocking ability.
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