That's good to know. It seems the issue is actually motherboard support. Newegg shows a single intel motherboard with ECC and no AMD ones. I suppose the low-end server hardware (e.g., HP Microservers) just tend to be AMD so it's easiest to get a cheap AMD server with ECC than an Intel one. I had assumed it was an intel issue but apparently not.

It would be nice if the intel ultrabook standard started including ECC as well. One can dream...

Unfortunately while the CPUs themselves are quite reasonable, motherboards tend to be far more expensive and less available. I wonder how much of a markup Intel has on the server chipsets vs. desktop ones; it'd be interesting to know whether Intel or motherboard manufacturers are making bank on the boards.