Promising to price their GPUs based on their performance in "Tier 3"* games will certainly help them win a lot of consumer goodwill though, especially with Intel targeting the critically underserved low and midrange gaming GPU market.
* For those OOTL, Intel has grouped all games in to three tiers based on driver optimization and graphics API usage. Tier 1 is DX12/Vulkan titles they have specifically optimized for. Tier 2 includes all other DX12/Vulkan titles. Tier 3 is DX11/OpenGL/older DX. Nvidia and AMD have had a decade+ to optimize their drivers for higher level APIs like DX11, including hundreds of game/engine specific optimizations. The result is ARC GPUs performing notably worse in DX11 titles than equivalent hardware from Nvidia and AMD.
Intel's promised pricing structure means that Your $250 ARC GPU will perform about as well in most Tier 3 games as a $250 RTX or Radeon. Meanwhile, Tier 1 and 2 DX12/Vulkan software will likely outperform competing devices in the same price range.
Secondly, most people in the world know China can ship hand-sized objects to their country and aren't above reselling.
Thirdly, in many countries it seems that postage from China is cheaper than postage from across the country.
This seems to me to be an officially deniable launch. A beta-launch as it were. A way Intel can say "Well, we didn't release it to you because it wasn't ready for you..." while still actually having launched it and having the whole world tell them what they need to fix.
But a release is a release. So they should be judged on their product. Which so far seems lacking.
I have hopes for the future though as they work on cleaning this mess up.
I get what you mean but people seem to be forgetting that Ryzen launched in an absolutely abysmal state and it took them a few iterations to get to the industry leader that we have today. I think Intel taking the loss leader perspective on this and essentially using people willing to buy as beta testers will pan out for them in the long run. They have been more transparent about it than AMD was with Ryzen or than Nvidia has been with literally anything which I appreciate.
If you want good reviews at launch, then launch a finished product.