Intel's greatest PR success in this mess has been to conflate Meltdown with Spectre. Only Intel is affected by Meltdown because of their design, and it is a more easily exploited bug.
Shipping or not, it illustrates, that Intel was not unique.
https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/reading-pri...
It's also not the scariest variant, it's easily fixed (performance degradation aside), doesn't require a microcode update to be fixed hence is 100% software mitigated, doesn't allow you to cross between guest and host memory address spaces and isn't remotely exploitable.
On the other hand variant 1 and 2 are much scarier because they are the complete opposite of Meltdown.
And Meltdown was the easiest to exploit. Spectre is "bad" because it affects everyone, but it's less exploitable than Intel's Meltdown.
Meltdown is the easiest to exploit and the easiest to fix it’s also the least scary one as far as compromises go.
While it's more easily exploited, it's also patchable with minimal performance impact, unlike Spectre in general.