So so much misinformation and lack of knowledge.
One, the problem with the Foxconn sockets isn't a problem for 99.9% of users. Unless you're doing competitive overclocking/benchmarking with a phase, dry ice, or LN2/LH4 (I've never seen liquid helium used with intel chips, cold bug) you don't have to worry. The reduced contact on the power delivery pins only becomes a problem when the CPU is sucking down over 150W of power. That simply is not going to happen with water or air cooling.
Two, the LGA1156 chips are not particularly anymore difficult to overclock than the LGA1366 chips. Getting to 4.0GHz with either the Lynnfield or Bloomfield platform is not that difficult. The Lynnfield chips generally will need a bit more vcore to reach the 4.2-4.3GHz range on account of the on-die PCIe controller, but not much more. Furthermore, their much lower TDP than the Bloomfield chips will offset this. Heat output will be more or less the same for both chips at similar clockspeeds.
Three. There seems to be this misconception that any LGA1156 processor does not support simultaneous multithreading. The Core i5 does not support SMT, however the Lynnfield-based Core i7 processors do support two threads per core just like their Bloomfield counterparts.
Unless you need gobs of PCIe lanes (triple SLI or SLI and a RAID HBA) you're better off getting a Lynnfield system. It'll save you about $100-$200 that you can spend on something else, maybe get an SSD. Finally, I think that AMD is pretty much irrelevant at this point. The consumer Nehalem variants have pushed AMD out of the mid-range and relegated them to the very low-end of the market.
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