Intel is making consumer-level motherboards now that are extremely competitive price- and feature-wise

I wasn't under the impression that it was the motherboards that were the price factor, but the processors. Looking at Pricewatch, the Athlon 3200 is $194 and the P4 3.2GHz is $274. It follows pretty much all the way down.

Storage Review.com has done tests on all the WD SATA disks, and while they aren't as fast as they are advertised (they're advertised as SCSI server disk replacements), they've come closer to those speeds than their PATA counterparts. So they do appear to be faster.