Sure, AMD had to price them so that they were competitive. From a consumer standpoint there were good potential reasons to buy them. From AMD's perspective, those were big chunks of silicon being sold for far less money than what Intel was able to charge for something that cost as much to manufacture. I doubt they made back their development expenses on them, though thankfully AMD had a lot of other products that worked out better.
I don't disagree, but my lab is full of st00pid cheap 8-core 8250 and 8350 chips running VMWare. I paid a fraction of what other folks paid for 4 core i7, and for my use case, I get lots more out of it. YMMV.
