If this is really your impression of the industry, you must be really young. It’s not “long-moated”. Intel was in a similar situation when the Opteron was current, and before they had to go head-to-head with Sun and IBM and before that nobody would even think of putting intel in a server at all. The period during which Intel’s products were the obviously superior choice lasted maybe 5-8 years at most. And it wasn’t some nefarious plot, either. Just good product.