I'm not saying it's bad, it looks like solid progress form Intel as we all continue to expect, but I don't get why this is considered 'tick+' when it seems less exciting to me than Nehalem.
If you have a discrete video card already, this won't replace that and isn't meant to. If you are looking to buy a laptop and want to play The Sims while you're on the airplane, that's what this is meant for.
Ivy Bridge is a "tick" (OK, "tick+") which means that it's fundamentally a die shrink of Sandy Bridge. It's rolling out lots of new stuff too, but it all has to do with how the 22nm Tri-Gate transistors are produced, the logic implemented is mostly the same. Compare this to Clarkdale/Arrandale, not Nehalem.
Because the huge of majority of the population does not care about "modern gaming", but they do care about less costs and improved batter life with an integrated GPU and would like to see it offer better performance for apps where it's needed?
The value that gets skipped by mainstream "tech sites" is that, yea its kinda crap at playing battlefield 3, but what it does do is create a baseline of capabilities that you can expect out of an average device. In other words, it opens the doors for mainstream adoption of technologies that weren't there before, ultimately leading to a new baseline performance for those putting out casual games.
I guess what I'm saying is that the next farmville could now have decent 3D graphics where as that was out of the question prior to the mainstreaming of decent GPUs. Intel plays a key role in that process.
Well, you have some point, but I think that Intel's GPU capabilities are far better than the needs of a casual 3D game. I would expect to first see some casual 3D games that utilizes at least that power, before I would think that more power is needed.
Also, a biggest problem is that MS doesn't support WebGL in IE, so no 3D casual games, except if you model them with a 3D engine build on Canvas (which would mean it would use only the 2D acceleration features of the GPU that the canvas uses).