This new IBM tech may give us a few more years of real processor innovation before marginal improvements every year become the standard.

This is true and I completely agree. While everyone has heard of Moore's Law, few have heard of Moore's Second Law (or Rock's Law) and this is what people should really be watching. Technology will advance no matter what (even if its just small steps). Its the price tag for that advancement that if gone without some type of check, will leave everyone else in the dust. It will come to years before the average consumer will be able to afford an update.

Wiki Link

As the cost of computer power to the consumer falls, the cost for producers to fulfill Moore's law follows an opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. Rising manufacturing costs are an important consideration for the sustaining of Moore's law. This had led to the formulation of Moore's second law, also called Rock's law, which is that the capital cost of a semiconductor fab also increases exponentially over time.

Thing is, if it makes it to market by Intel, it will most likely end up in a PowerPC chip. If the chip is powerful enough, I can foresee the possibility of Macs reverting back to PowerPC (If IBM decides to reenter the desktop computing market) which would be a huge crush performance wise against x86, and might even prompt Microsoft to dust off some old Windows NT PowerPC code and reimplement the port moving forward, which would be better for PC manufacturers as well because PowerPC is licensing free as opposed to x86.

Moore's law is a few years from hiting a brickwall on 2D space, that's the reason we're seeing things like HBM memory on AMDs latest videocards. The solution to keep it going is stacking chips in 3D. I can't wait to see who's gonna come with the fisrt stacked CPU or GPU.