I was actually thinking about switching to AMD. Not that it'd make any difference...

For what it's worth, I'm incredibly satisfied with my AMD FX-6200.

Why buy the bully chips at all? Intel was always like that, therefore most of my PCs were on AMD where possible.

"like that"? What does that mean?

I see them usually releasing good quality drivers for graphics (http://intellinuxgraphics.org/) and wireless (http://intellinuxwireless.org/ until they got into main kernel). This is the least problematic hardware I had to deal with.