Who cares about hw virtualization in a desktop cpu anyway?

Yeap. A cool $50 cheaper than the E7500 for more or less the same performance and the better functionality. The new E6000 series is basically re-inventinng what the Pentium Dual Core means. Unless I'm very mistaken, we'll see the entire Core 2 line transitioning to the Pentium brand under $100. There's hardly any difference now, apart from the cache.

Update- Anandtech on Intel's new simplified product structuring-
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=15457

It would be nice if Intel would not use the same model numbers for completely different processors.

I'm a little curious to see if we'll ever see something introduced on LGA775 faster than the 3.33GHz E8600. I fail to see how much business sense it will make, but it is not like everything Intel has done lately is terribly predictable.

Heads up, no SSE 4(.1), like all the other Pentium Dual-Core processors (and unlike the Core 2 Duo branded 45 nm ones).

It certainly makes sense for this to be happening, especially if the 3000-series Celerons have the rumored specs (they seems to be essentially the same as 2000-series Pentium Dual Cores, except with VT enabled and built at 45nm). I still think Intel tries to hard to micromanage market segments; if I were them, I'd probably restructure things on the desktop along the lines of

<$35 Atom
$35-$75 Celeron (ditch everything but the 3000 series)
$75-$150 Pentium (ditch everything but the 6000 series)
$150-$250 Core 2 (ditch everything but the E7000 series and Q8000 series, as the high end's almost entirely moved on to i7 anyway), transitioning to Core i5
>$250 Core i7

disregard.

This is what 2008 would have been like if AMD had some fast dual-cores. Intel's been withholding the speedbumps until that happened.

That's a lot of CPU for the money; should be a great budget gaming CPU. In fact, I can't think of a better CPU value in the last 20 years.