Meh, I dont know what's in the contract, but as long as there's nothing stated about memory controllers integrated or external regarding CPU's, I dont think Intel has much to stand on.

Although Ive read several complaints about nVidia chipsets for the Intel platform, they're damn good on AMD platform. I dont know where the issue is on the Intel platform, but if they somehow get that right (for example no need for a memory controller), they would have to offer something good over X58 since that does offer SLI and CFX now. So for example good ref. clocking, improved mGPU performance, hybrid SLI solutions etc.

Hard thing to make nForce worth it over X58, but if they get it working they've quite a huge market. At least eVGA, XFX etc wouldnt think twice to release pure nForce boards, maybe even drop X58 boards. However, if they dont get it working, which is likely since all those things are simply hard to to accomplish, I wouldnt even bother. Or maybe if they would be able to release the same features for 100$ less

But regarding this whole thing... whatever. There's always something to crap about between them. nVidia made ups, but so did Intel. Im still convinced they would have sold less X58's if there was no SLI support since I sense a stronger nVidia preferance over any CPU preferance, could be me though.