really? I heard they're producing plenty and able to ship NOW NOW NOW

reminds me of the phrase "little did he know"

anyway, let's just be polite about this and practical:
ATi's Good points:
- ATi supplies are announced to be greater than Nvidia's
- Nvidia wasn't available at MSRP for most brands
- ATi is actually cheaper
- the performance down scaling in high resolutions when AA and AF are enabled was in ATi's favor "using latest drivers"
- Directx 10.1 is pretty much patchable in games and will be taken advantage of whenever SP1 is released.
- Stock cooler is much quieter than that of Nvidia.
- maximum overclocking seen raised core from 775 to 905 on air with no vmodds and memory from 1.1Ghz to 1.31Ghz
- Crossfire is supported by both ATi/AMD AND Intel

Nvidia's Good points:
- better overall performance compared generally to the HD 3870XT from 5%-10%
- pretty much overclockable, reached 760 with many users with an after market cooler "+30$ cost"

Finally:
- if you like Nvidia, go with Nvidia if you don't mind the extra 30$ over the MSRP + another 30$ for after market cooler.
- if you like ATi, go with ATi, you won't be missing anything, plus you won't feel the noise.
- if you like overclocking, both are good deals.

if other decoding software suppliers are not making use of the technology it doesn't mean it is fake.

anyway, i tested it with KMplayer "had to screw around with the internal decoders and load external ones" and it dropped the cpu load around 10%, which is pretty good for a dual core i guess.