Maybe it was AMD lighting a fire under their asses, but it seemed like during the socket 1366 era Intel was doing everything right by the enthusiast market, but they've seemingly done a complete about-face - now the "-E" variants come out much later than the mainstream chips, the prices are sky high across the entire platform. I don't want to see this continue.
While I understand some of the justification for going mainstream --> professional in terms of platform release schedule (works out bugs before pushing the high end/more demanding), it does end up with a nasty consequence. It makes it harder to want to love the higher end platform when its getting the tech later, and arguably is going to be constantly pushed to have less time before the mainstream platform gets refreshed to newer tech that arguably outpaces it. Yes, its more "refined" after 6-12 months as a mainstream beta test, but makes the ROI seem somewhat worse.