Give it another 6-12 months before going for an i7. In the meantime if you need to buy, look for bargains amongst the Core 2's.

I just wish AMD (and ATI) had something to match the Intel/ nVidia stranglehold, but they're way off the pace at the moment.

What?

You do know ATI's on top this gen for having unbeatable price:performance right?  And don't ignore the fact that AMD's ATI division is making profit (though barely) and Nvidia is losing hundreds of millions of dollars each quarter.

In any case, the situation is not comparable to the AMD/Intel one

Go the i7 route if you want top of the line.

Go the Core 2 Quad or Phenom route if you want midrange for a few more years.

ATI is NOT on top. Are you crazy? They do have good value for performance, but they are still a few steps below Nvidia, and their drivers are HORRIBLE in comparison.

I had more problems with my 8800GT than I ever had with my 4870X2 so drivers problems are subjective.

They have the best value which puts them on top for many including me. I could've easily gone for the GTX 295 but paying €150 more (in my country) for a ~10% performance increase is laughable and wasn't something I was willing to do. Nvidia fucked up this gen with their pricing. 

ATI's Cards have been very favorable this gen especially when factoring in price. In fact they forced Nvidia to drop the price of their GTX280.

As for Drivers. That is an old complaint. It is kind of like complaing that nintendo uses carts..In other words I haven't heard of many issues with drivers about ATI in the past year or so.

ATI gives more bang for the buck even in the higher in the higher end of things. Also the perform better with stream processors than Nvida cards do even with all the work that went into CUDA.

I also have noticed that ATI cards have worked better with High Def video than most Nvidia cards.

That said Nvidia makes a hell of a nice CS4 accelerator and they are coming out with a GCPU soon which looks awesome and the GTX 300 is supposed ot be something special in terms of stream processing as well.

ATi lost some steps during the R600 series (price, drivers, performance) that gave nVidia a good lead for almost a year and a half but since the R700 series ATi have redeemed themselves quite nicely.

What advantage nVidia does still hold is their relationships with several publishers and game engine producers with their The Way It's meant To Be Played campaign.

That is good to know.. I'll need to upgrade soonish for rendering purposes.

Still not accurate information. i7 with it's DDR3 capabilities allows the bottle necks the Phenom and Core series produce to be completely bypassed showing massive improvements in videogames at higher resolutions. 

Go for the Phenom II X4 955. You'll spare up to $100 between motherboard/processor while keeping a similar game performance, unless you want to go Crossfire/SLI, of course.

But if you aren't into gaming, grab a i7 920.