There's no question that Intel's response is entirely dictated by the legal ramifications of the coming lawsuits.

...but irrespective of that, it ALSO appears that there's no leadership within Intel to actually fix the underlying issue.

I don't care if the PR is BS - that's what I expect. But if the chips are not fixed the right way, I'm taking my business elsewhere, and I'm not alone.

You face a big issue there. Meltdown is a core architecture issue. It will take a long time to make a fix. Add to that the need for a completely new branch predictor (a notoriously hard design issue) and you're talking about a lot of time. Intel and AMD should already have next years designs done (AMD has said as much with Zen 2). You'll most likely be looking at late 2020 to early 2021 before the fixed architecture is thoroughly tested, taped out, and being produced in volume.

So are we saying that since nothing is getting fixed in that interim period, that AMD chips suffer much less performance impact due to their lesser exposure to the issue?

Even 2021 is overoptimistic. Typical turnaround for a major design change in a CPU is more like 5 years.