Re: Intel - boo, hiss!
Depends how far back you go, just over ten years ago AMD had the Athlon 64, which was cheaper, faster and cooler than Intel's offerings, oh, and it was 64 bit whilst still fully compatible with 32bit OSes. Intel had the 64 bit Itanium for servers, which were expensive, not that fast, and not backwards compatible. On the Desktop they had the Pentium 4, which was great if you needed to turn electricity into heat, but otherwise kind of pointless.
Before that there was the Athlon XP, which while not quite as fast as the fastest Intel offerings, much like today they were cheaper for the same performance.
But yeah, AMD's mobile CPUs have never been that competitive so you're making the right choice there.