"Why have the Opteron adoption press releases dried up completely?"
I didn't know they dried up. Certainly the noises that Sun has been makely about Opteron lately have been pretty continous. But true, I haven't seen any announcements lately about single sales of Opteron systems. Hmm, come to think of it, outside of the vast majority of supercomputer announcements this year, I don't recall any press release regarding the sale of just a single Opteron system. I agree, that is pretty ominous...