People who says that AMD wouldn't be able to add two cores to Phenom II and rise frequencies at the same time. Consider this:

Agena 4C 2.6GHz 2Mb L3 65nm
Thuban 6C 3.3GHz 6Mb L3 45nm

Thats 50% more cores, 27% higher frequency and 200% more cache, and still cooler than Agena. Of course you can't just extrapolate this gains into 32nm, but I think it's reasonable to say that we would be able to see 33% more cores, higher frequencies (even more with turbo) and an extra 2Mb cache and still have a smaller chip than Thuban. Throw in some core enhancements and you're set.
Would it be as competitive as BD? Maybe, maybe not, but I think it's a bad sign when you first really new architecture in 12 years isn't clearly a better choice than the old one. Intel did this once, they crippled their old P6 in favor for Pentium 4 a century ago, it turned out that then the improved P6 came back 5 years later it was twice as fast as their current Pentium 4, and that's dual vs. dual, their P6 derived architecture had more thermal room for extra cores and came as C2Q delivering even more performance.

Well I think even a beefed up high frequency 4C/6C Phenom III with doubled FMAC capable FPU and better prefetchers.would actually perform better against Intels quads than BD will considering the leaks and price. But AMD made the choice to focus on cores to make it an Apples to Oranges comparison they could benefit from. I think it's their server focus that makes them do bad desktop processors, in server world multithreading is everything.