Looks like Intel is realizing that not a heck of a lot of people are buying P4's right now so they are gonna crank the speed up on them. The 2GHz P4 chips were expected fairly soon but now they are expected even fairly sooner! They are going to push the P4-2GHz chip out within the next few months and will also be putting emphasis on the 845 chipset (shipping in just a couple of weeks) which will let people use their current SDRAM instead of taking it in the butt from Rambus.

The move will increase the chip's presence in the mainstream part of the PC market while collapsing the current pricing gap between PCs based on Intel's Pentium III and systems based on the Pentium 4 processor. The end result will be a full transition from Pentium III to Pentium 4 on the desktop before the end of the year, [snip] Intel previously expected the Pentium 4 to dominate its desktop PC market in early 2002

Getting a P4 wasnt even a consideration for me back when I did my last upgrade. AMD has managed to get 22% of the market now and we're all scoring the benefits. Darn if I can remember what AMD plans on doing by the end of the year though.