ATI seeking the light

By now everybody must have learnt about ATI's distressfull situation. Chronic delays behind NVidia - be it for crossfire technology or for the new generations of GPU - have been seriously backfiring on the Canadian graphic card maker.
Take the Radeon X1800XT, flagship of the company: this card was announced months ago but it is only beginning to be delivered now in ridiculously small quantities. But the most irritating factor for prospecting clients is certainly the fact that ATI has been consistently changing its specifications in order to match the latest Geforce 7800 GTX's. While the VPU X1800XT's base frequency was first announced as 625MHz, it has since skipped to 650MHz and will probably reach 700MHz in another version. Then again you never know: these products are not even on the market... And on top of that, as if to push the customers away for good, a steady rumour wants it that new high-end VPUs are to come out during the first quarter next year (Source: Digitimes).
This stubborn uncertainty might well be ATI's heaviest burden.