Well when the first generation Pentium 4 came out, it was very expensive and clock for clock was slower against Pentium III, but after a few revisions it stood up to the top model Athlon XP 3200+. Then later Nehalem was released, inheriting Hyperthreading which was developed thanks to Pentium 4.

There is no reason why tweaking cannot get the Bulldozer on track, remember it has excellent multithreading performance, just the IPC that needs to be tweaked.

Also AMD engineers are speaking out that they are underfunded by the new management which is why they don't have the resources to create a good chip.