>It is known since... forever?, that one should not speculate across security boundaries.

... if you value security over raw performance. Clearly Intel has decided at some point that it was worth playing with fire in order to get ahead in benchmarks. In their defence it seems to have worked reasonably well for them for quite a while.

>The people most annoyed are the users.

I wish, but I wonder how much of that is true. Are most users even aware of these problems? They get patched automatically by OS vendors and then most of the time they won't hear about them anymore. I think the "nobody gets fired for choosing Intel" will probably still prevail for quite some time.