I think that's mostly a market segmentation measure given the timing, though in a sense you're right since it does protect consumers. They do have SMT enabled

I think that's mostly a market segmentation measure given the timing, though in a sense you're right since it does protect consumers. They do have SMT enabled on most laptop processors, too. I worry that they'll have a hard time getting all they can out of the full width of Haswell and later chips without SMT.