Gaming and enthusiast machines are only a fraction of AMD's market, most consumers and clients didn't care about the features AMD's marketing department lied about.
AMD did not lie about some particular feature of Bulldozer.
They lied by claiming that Bulldozer should be faster than Sandy Bridge, while knowing that it is completely impossible for their claims to be true.
Even without running any benchmark, it was trivial to predict that at similar clock frequencies the "8-core" Bulldozer must be slower than the 4-core Sandy Bridge.
For multi-threaded performance, the complete Bulldozer had between 50% and 100% of the number of arithmetic units of Sandy Bridge, so in the best case it could match but not exceed Sandy Bridge.
For single-threaded integer performance, one Bulldozer "core" had between 25% and 50% of the number of arithmetic units of Sandy Bridge, so in the best case it could be only half as fast as Sandy Bridge.
The only chance for Bulldozer to beat Sandy Bridge as in the AMD claims would have been a very high clock frequency, in the 5 to 7 GHz range.
However, AMD never made the false claim that Bulldozer will beat Sandy Bridge by having a much higher clock frequency. They claimed that they will beat Intel by having more "cores", which implied more arithmetic units, while knowing very well that they had decided to remove a large part of the arithmetic units from their cores, at the same time when Intel was adding arithmetic units to their cores, instead of removing them.
