So you believe AMD sucks?
No, they just don't have competitive CPUs outside of low-end desktops and multi-socket servers right now. Intel was in a similar situation a few years ago when the Athlon 64 (and especially the Athlon 64 X2) came out and started stomping all over Pentium 4 derivatives (the only place where Intel was clearly better was in notebook chips, where they used the Pentium M family rather than the Pentium 4 family), except that AMD couldn't come close to meeting all the CPU demand out there so Intel sold tons of desktop and server CPUs anyway (not enough manufacturing capacity, and building it up took too long).
I mean, if you're going to spend $100-$150 on a CPU, what makes sense to buy right now? From Intel, it's a Core 2 Duo E7200 for $130 (they have a few other things in the price range, but they're all worse). From AMD, it's either an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ for $115 (a 6400+ is $150, and 200 MHz is not worth $35 on the margins) or a Phenom X3 8450 for $125 (same deal, an 8650 is $145). The E7200 is going to win pretty much every benchmark against either (even the highly multithreaded ones vs. the tri-core, because it's a better architecture).
For $150-$200 on the Intel side, you're clearly looking at an Core 2 Duo E8400 for $180 (a Core 2 Quad Q6600 for $185 is sort of interesting, but not worth giving up 600 MHz and the advantages of Intel's 45nm chips over their 65nm versions). And the E8400 is faster than any dual-core or tri-core AMD makes. Except where multi-threading helps a lot, it's faster than any quad-core AMD makes -- and there the Q6600 is almost always better. And beyond that you're comparing Q9xxx quads with the top-end Phenoms, and that just doesn't look good for AMD.
Now, if you're spending under $100, then AMD's CPUs look pretty good (unless you're one of those crazy overclockers; Intel's current low-end chips overclock quite well), though the Pentium and Celeron dual-cores aren't bad at all (and the E5xxx Pentiums coming in the next few months may pretty much end the budget case for AMD).