Fortunately the semiconductor industry does not work on what one person thinks.
It has always worked on what is possible at any given time while being financially viable.
Even Intel, which has loads of money and invests heavily in its own fab does this. They release new architecture on old fab and then shrink it mid way in its life.
This whole screw-up of 40nm and delayed move to 32nm was bound to happen sometime in GFX industry. The pace at which this industry has moved is the reason we are where we are. This was just waiting to happen.
The whole double the performance / frequency every generation bubble burst in CPU industry a while back. It is waiting to burst in GPU industry. It will be a miracle and incredible feat on AMD's part if Cayman ends up being as fast as 5970.
At the moment 32nm cant happen. Period.. Move on and concentrate on what we might get.

It will be an achievement in itself if they can manage even 10% performance increase over GTX 480 while being a smaller, less power hungry chip. Enough has changed on the chip level to call it a new series. Enough time has passed to call it a new series. Nvidia was late to the party, not AMD.