These kind of business practices, no matter how deviant they seem to me, happen to be part of the game. Like it or not, its "all about the benjamins." The Inquirer is reporting that Chipzilla, a.k.a. Intel dished out $18M in marketing funds to IBM to try to sway Big Blue back into promoting Xeons.

"... (IBM's) small server division kindly accepted something like $18 million from Intel's capacious marketing funds to stop whingeing about Opteron chips and get with the Xeon game."