It makes great business sense to offer a super-expensive line of QC parts as early as possible. Every quarter of sales, while Intel has no offering, is worth $$$ and prestige and PR. Look what happened with DC Opteron, for instance.
Large volumes aren't needed. These should be $2000-$3000 parts in 2006.
I'm not too worried about QC. If they can't ramp 65 nm fast enough to field a QC competitive with NGA QC, they can always kludge together a couple of dualies under one heatspreader.