nO-One: PowerPC and Intelx86 processors are quite different, one is RISC the other CISC as such this would be reflected in their architecture- if that takes effect on the number of pipelines that are in the processor, I dont know for sure, but it makes sense to me. (FYI- \'R\'educted/\'C\'omplex Instruction Set Chip)
N-Player: I think its optimistic to think that Sony/Toshiba/IBM will muscle in on nVidias domain anytime soon, it took nVidia years to replace 3dfx as the \'market leaders\' at the moment there isnt even a sign of a EE based graphics board on the market, shame.
The fact that the geForce 3 isnt doing much more than current days cards at this moment isnt down to the design, but rather the software - they need to code support for the features on the card, its like playing pacman on your PC with a 3d card and complaining when things arent running faster. Until the new features are supported in games you wont see the potential of the card.
Go watch the DooM3 video a few times, thats a pretty good example of the evolutionary step from gf2 to gf3.
-bd