i think we are going to see some amazing things happening from AMD. Imagine the two techies meeting, one from GFX side and one from CPU side and the cross polination of ideas that could stem from that.
either that, or Nvidia is going to use this opportunity to deal a final blow to AMD/ATI gfx sector.
Because that merger would not be beneficial to Nvidia nor to AMD at all.
NV is probably going to be up against an even more powerful ATI, but that's fine cause that will mean with the next 12 months we'll get 7900GTX sli performance from a single GPU
I think it will be wrong if AMD completely shutdown the name ATI because it's a trusted name and they have a lot of fans. I think AMD will keep making ATI cards just with better AMD support.