I don't imagine that will last for very long, particularly if Conroe turns out to be as good as the preliminary benchmarks are showing. Prelim benchmarks for AMD's socket AM2 CPUs aren't looking that great either, very marginal differences between the new models and the old socket 939 CPUs.
This is very interesting, I had been guessing Alienware lost it's touch and hasn't been making any noise lately with people being able to get computers so much cheaper and still customize. I wonder if Dell did it to eliminate some competition, or to perhaps just get some ideas, or both.... Will be interesting to see what happens.
My take on it is that Dell realizes that they are becoming a vendor that people primarily go to based one factor alone - cost (I'm more specifically referring to individual consumers). They have been dabbling a bit in the high end, high margin gaming segment with their XPS systems, and are clearly looking to expand on this. The thing that I don't fully understand about this is that the PC industry is extremely commoditized at this point. I am oversimplying somewhat, but it wouldn't really be all that difficult to make yourself another Alienware company, given that the parts to do so are readily available. An established brand has value to it, but the barriers to entry in the PC market are far lower than many if not most other industries.