Agreed. VIA has served to drag AMD's name down rather badly.
There are only three things that AMD would have to do to win my undying devotion and love.
1) Put thermal protection into their CPUs so that they don't burn to death if they overheat for any reason.
2) Produce their own motherboard chipsets like Intel does that are optimized specifically for their CPUs. (Notice how much faster an i815 motherboard runs an Intel chip than a VIA motherboard. Why can't we see AMD do the same thing for their chips?)
3) Have multiple-processor support.
Nothing would make me happier than to see a dual Athlon system on an AMD chipset motherboard running at 1.3GHz each thanks to some serious overclocking without worries that if a fan were to suddenly give out a chip would fry.
I don't believe AMD has the chipset technology that VIA stole from Intel (remember the lawsuites?). So VIA is junk because they did not apply that technology in an appropriate manner, or maybe their engineers are idiots, but anyway, AMD is at a disadvantage in the chipset design industry.
That they've delayed it's release because of problems with development.
That even finding it now is next to impossible.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that AMD has FINALLY made it's own chipset. But it sure has taken them long enough. And it sure has cost them enough to have had people believe that AMDs were so unstable just because of the VIA chipsets that you used to have to use.
And even now, if I were to buy a motherboard with their new chipset today, how can I actually trust that it won't be buggy and won't need a few revisions and several driver updates before it's even close to usable? I have no such assurance. And why don't I? Because it's taken AMD so long to give us their own chipset that no one knows if they're any good at making a chipset.
I think it's great that they're finally making one. But it's just taken them WAY too long to do it. And I won't be able to trust that it actually works for at least a few more months now. And I won't take the risk to buy it until I know it'll be stable.