No one would be buying A100's if CUDA hadn't been supported on all desktop Nvidia cards for years. Desktop cards provide an accessible on ramp to the ecosystem. PhD grads with boxes of desktop cards turn into the purchasers of data center chips.
The way things go, I think the AMD consumer card experience will only get better once AMD manage to gimp consumer cards’ ML throughput or RAM.
Que? Making things worse will make things better?
...that's exactly how you get disruptive competition.
Look at IBM, they sell technologies that no one uses until they get hired to work on them specifically. It's profitable enough but it's not a way to grow the ecosystem/market.
AMD would be selling 48GB 7900s or AI-only W7900s if they really wanted a consumer card ramp.
They don't. Not because they can't (they literally prevent OEMs from doing so, who would double up VRAM in a heartbeat without AMD lifting a finger), but because AMD doesn't want that.