Given enough time, SPARC chips would also become vulnerable to these issues. See what happened to ARM: their later (higher performance) designs are more vulnerable than their older designs.
Solaris, with the exceptions of a few bright stars like DTrace and ZFS, always seemed like a POS to me, compared to linux. Especially as a work-station. Sun went full retard with Java everywhere right before they went under and I have a feeling the Solaris Desktop experience, and by extension the UNIX desktop experience, would be something from my worst nightmares, something to make wish for Windows Vista.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and loved FreeBSD back when it was more easy to choose... But I do think the 'free UNIX' movement has had unintended consequences like the demise of Sun, and perhaps now also this exposing of a failure in what was a desktop class chip architecture that was elevated to server usage.
Everything has a cost is all I'm saying.
Honestly, back when Linux started getting momentum, RMS' GNU/Linux argument had merit. Most of the stuff people where running on top of Linux, never mind using to develop Linux, came from the GNU project.
Linux is what allowed Intel to get its biggest foothold into the UNIX server market.